Chapter One
Amaknak Island, Alaska 13, September 2106
Rain and wind seemed to be an ever-present fact in the Aleutian Islands. Wind rolled over the hills and through the valleys even as the almost almost-constant rain continued to soak an already saturated land. The wind drove the rain hard enough to sting the skin and made the chilly air feel truly cold. Never truly warm and always wet, it was a miserable place to be a soldier. The combination of being cold and wet made even the best, most attentive sentry less effective.
The sentries around the gun emplacement were no exception. Each of them had the hoods of their coats pulled as tightly as possible around their heads in an attempt to block out the chill and shield their faces from the stinging rain. The weather had made them focus on the memory of being warm and dry instead of being alert against attack and watching over sleeping comrades. The encompassing storm made it even more certain that their attention was on their own discomfort and not on their duty. They were certain that no enemy would, or could, attack in such weather.
FIRE Team Alpha had encountered no enemy patrol vessels when it landed in small boats on the island’s northern shore and had seen no infantry patrols as the team scaled the nine-hundred-foot Ulakta Head cliffs while fighting sixty-mile-per-hour winds. Also without incident, they had made their way over the mountainous terrain to Dutch Harbor. They moved through the driving winds and to their target, situated at the end of a long, thin strip of land that jutted out from the island and into Iliuliuk Bay; a place called Spithead.
It was a concession to the emplacement’s importance that the sentries were still outdoors and not sheltering inside the fortified structure. The four 190mm cannons in the emplacement’s gun battery were housed in an octagonal steel-reinforced synthetic granite bunker and commanded not only all of Iliuliuk Bay but all of Amaknak Island and much of neighboring Unalaska Island as well. This meant that although they were meant to destroy any enemy vessels that entered the harbor, the city of Unalaska and all of Dutch Harbor, as well as the community’s small airport, were also within range of the guns. The emplacement would be key to repelling any American invasion of the islands.
The city of Unalaska occupied all of Amaknak Island and a large part of neighboring Unalaska Island; it was largely built around Dutch Harbor and surrounded Iluiliuk Bay. The two islands were the last pieces of American territory occupied by forces that had once belonged to the now-defunct World Central Authority. When the Asian nations had withdrawn from the WCA, the Asian troops that had been fighting the Americans and their allies in Alaska had been withdrawn. The troops occupying the islands now were under the authority of the newly-reorganized European Union.
Dutch Harbor and its surroundings had been fortified and turned into the last bastion of globalist power on United States soil. It held both symbolic and strategic value. The two islands on which Dutch Harbor was located had been taken by foreign troops over a decade ago. Douglas Carter and his team were there to take them back.
With his more-than-human night vision, Carter watched as Brandon Williams, his second in command, approached the two sentries calmly, a long, black watch coat pulled tightly around his body. Tall and wraithlike, he moved with slow, deliberate intention.
The hood of his coat was pulled low over his eyes and his head was down as he walked against the driving wind. He had a European Union Army issue AN-2000 rifle slung over his shoulder along with its attendant bandolier of loaded magazines. He looked, for all intents and purposes, like another miserable sentry who had been forced to be outside when any sane person would be inside.
“What are you doing here?” the ranking sentry, a corporal, asked in Esperanto tinged in an Italian accent. “Our watch isn’t over for over an hour.” He barely raised his head to ask the question, sure that there would be a mundane explanation for the unexpected visitor.
“Orders,” Williams said, also speaking in the preferred globalist language of Esperanto. He was now within arm’s reach of both sentries.
“What orders?” the corporal asked, still not bothering to raise his eyes.
Williams struck him across the throat with the edge of his left hand and punched him in the chest with his right; shattering the windpipe and sternum, propelling him into the emplacement’s concrete wall hard enough to break his back. The sheer force of the blow to the chest fragmented his sternum, collapsed the man’s lungs and smashed his heart between the breast-bone and the spine. The corporal crumpled to the ground and gasped, without success, for breath.
Before the corporal’s brain had registered the pain of William’s fist blow, Williams hit the second guard in the nose with heel of his right palm, shattered his left knee with a lightning-fast kick and snapped his neck with an effortless twist of his head. The body hit the muddy ground with dull thud, joining the lifeless body of the corporal.
Williams discarded the captured coat and rifle as Carter and the other members of Team Alpha emerged from the storm-thickened night, revealing the same type of commando-black jumpsuit and tactical vest that his teammates wore. One of those teammates, Robert McNamara, a stout, bearded Canadian Sergeant, returned William’s own tactical hood, helmet and weapon. His sand-brown hair was briefly exposed to the wind and rain as he removed the coat and replaced it with his own hood and helmet before fitting a set of multi-optic goggles over his eyes.
All of Team Alpha’s operators were now fully clad in I.B.O.S., the Individual Battlefield Operation System. It was an infantry battle suit which combined various sensors, communication equipment, multi-chromatic camouflage, an automated emergency medical system, a battlefield computer, and armor protection against small arms fire into a single integrated unit. With the hood and goggles in place, the I.B.O.S. suit covered an operator from head to toe; leaving only his eyes, nose and chin exposed.
McNamara looked down at the lifeless forms of the two sentries and then at Williams. “Always a pleasure watching you work, Harvard,” the Canadian sergeant said to Williams, addressing him by his team call sign.
“Brains, did you get it?” Carter asked Gary Sains, a broad-shouldered, dark-haired American staff sergeant.
Sains answered to his own call sign. “Yep, I pulled out of the corporal’s pea-brain just as he breathed his last.”
“Get it open, then,” Carter ordered. Sains moved toward the bunker’s steel entrance door. “On it, boss,” he replied. Having used his telepathic abilities to take the seven-digit entry code directly out of the dying corporal’s mind, he entered the digits and paused with his finger over the ‘enter’ button. “Is everybody ready?” he asked.
McNamara stood at other side of the door’s threshold from Sains with a stun grenade ready in his hand. The grenade would momentarily incapacitate the enemy soldiers without risk of detonating the tons of ammunition stored within the bunker. Carter, Williams, and the other six team members formed lines on either side of the door; five operators on each side. Each placed a hand on the shoulder of the operator in front of him; each was ready to rush into the bunker an instant after McNamara’s grenade detonated.
Carter assured himself that his operators were ready to effect entry into the emplacement. “Execute!” he ordered.
The door slid open and McNamara tossed the grenade. Detonating at eye level, it produced a blinding white flash of light and thunderous crack that ruptured the unprotected eardrums of the soldiers inside, causing blood to ooze from their ears. Before the crew could even fully experience their pain, the Team Alpha operators were upon them; their own hearing had been protected by their noise-canceling headphones.
With a speed borne of endless repetition and training, the Alpha operators quickly cleared the threshold in a precise order, each operator moving alternately to the left and right and taking control of predetermined area of the room and killing any enemy troops in that area. Four enemy soldiers were dead in under one second.
Having cleared the room that served as the emplacement’s fire control center, the operators broke into two elements. One moved to storm the room that housed the emplacement’s gun battery while the other breached the door that led to the stairway which, in turn, led to the armored magazine housing the battery’s ammunition.
The door to the gun room burst open as the operators moved toward it. An aged, grizzled European Union sergeant was astonished to be confronted by an enemy soldier less than three feet away from him. He tried to raise his sidearm.
Without breaking stride, Okesa Nagura shot the old sergeant in his face. The bullet from her 4.8mm machine pistol plowed through the bridge of his nose and tore away the back of his skull. With brutal, cat-like grace, she kicked the corpse away as it fell, clearing the threshold so the body would not obstruct the team’s movements. She bounded over the body and rushed to the left along the gun room’s wall, shooting an enemy trooper as he tried to snatch up his rifle from where it had been leaning against a wall.
Milliseconds later, Sharron Roth shot another member of the gun crew as he attempted to rise from a chair in the corner to her right, the high-explosive round from her battle-rifle exploding inside his chest cavity and effectively hollowing out his upper torso.
The sound of Nagura’s gunfire had not faded before Jason Redhand, a tall, powerfully-built Cheyenne warrior, had darted through the doorway and fired two shots that struck the fourth gun-crewman as he tried in vain to raise his rifle to his shoulder. The sub-machine gun rounds struck the man’s chest and head, blasting them away from the upper torso.
Carter entered an eye-blink behind Redhand and shot the battery’s commander in his heart. Each operator then shouted “clear!,” indicating that any threats in their assigned sector of the room had been eliminated.
“Get the guns ready to load,” Carter ordered as he searched the battery commander’s body for any useful documents.
“On it, boss,” Redhand said as he and Roth opened the breeches on two of the massive cannons.
One floor below, a series of breaching charges exploded, weakening key stress points in the ammunition magazine’s vault-like door. McNamara kicked the weakened door off its hinges, charged through the threshold and moved to the right, firing a single round from his submachine gun into the head of an enemy trooper who was crouching behind the cradle of the large hydraulic hoist that was used to move the cannon shells from the ammunition magazine to the guns on the floor above.
To his right, Joan Corey put a three-shot burst from her machine-pistol into an enemy trooper who had fallen to his knees and was frantically trying to crawl across the six-foot distance to his dropped rifle. Corey’s rounds found their mark beneath his right armpit, their micro-explosive tips detonating deep in his body and destroying his heart and lungs.
The last of the magazine’s defenders was a short, boyish-looking man with the light of fanaticism in his eyes. He had hidden behind the rack that contained the propellant bags used to launch cannon projectiles; each bag contained seventy-five pounds of explosives. The fanatical enemy soldier had pulled the pin of a fragmentation grenade as McNamara had entered the magazine chamber, intending to detonate the ammunition within it, killing himself and his attackers.
Holding the grenade in his hand; he looked at it in astonishment when he realized that he was incapable of releasing his grip on the grenade’s striker lever. Until the lever was released, the grenade would not detonate. An unseen force held the soldier’s hand firmly closed around the hand-held bomb, rendering it harmless.
Tiffany Bristol; call sign Magic, kept her telekinetic power focused on the hand around the grenade, the power of her mind reaching across the room to do her will. The zealous enemy soldier glared at the African operator in frustration and awe.
In a blur of motion, Bishnu Gurung, a short but stoutly built Ghurkha Warrior from the mountains of Nepal, passed to her right. An instant later the grenade-holding soldier’s head, along with the hand holding the grenade, was cut from his body with two lightening-fast stokes from the Gurka’s signature curved, eighteen-inch long Kukri fighting knife. The head hit the floor with a pronounced thud and rolled for several feet. Bristol’s mental powers still held both the severed hand and the grenade suspended in mid-air.
Gurung searched the floor briefly for the grenade’s pin. He found it seconds later where the now-headless enemy soldier had discarded it. He calmly put the pin back into the grenade and then flashed Bristol an upturned thumb to single that it was safe for her to release her telekinetic hold. The Ghurkha had a broad grin and a somewhat disconcerting gleam in his eye as he shouted “Clear!”
“The magazine is secure,” Williams said from his post maintaining rear security at the magazine’s threshold.
“Good,” Carter responded. “They can start sending up the ammo now.”
Less than a minute later the hoist emerged from the magazine room through a trapdoor in the gun room’s floor with four, three hundred-pound projectiles and eight propellant bags. Carter, Redhand, Roth and Nagura began loading first two cannons using the electric conveyor belts at the base of each gun. As the breeches of the first two guns were slammed closed, McNamara and Gurung came up from the magazine and began loading the second pair of guns from ammunition on the hoist. Once emptied, the hoist returned to the lower level to be reloaded by Bristol and Corey.
McNamara slammed the breech of a gun closed. “We’re ready to fire, Boss.” he reported. “Why do I feel like reciting Charge of the Light Brigade?”
“Beats me,” Carter said. “That poem was about a cavalry unit and that unit was on the other side of the cannons. They were all but wiped out, too, if I recall correctly.”
Carter turned to Redhand, who was kneeling calmly with his hands on his knees. “Are you ready, Remo?” he asked.
Answering to his call sign, Redhand nodded, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. His body took on a statue-like stillness; his breathing became deep and slow. “Ready,” he said. His voice was hollow and distant. His consciousness expanded, existing in many places at once. For Redhand, past, present, and future became one and the same.
“Fire,” Carter ordered.
The four cannons spat fire almost in unison. Miles away, the massive warheads exploded on or near the three additional artillery positions that bracketed Iliuliuk Bay.
“You’re on target for emplacements three, and four,” Redhand reported, seeing the impacts through trans-located psychic awareness. Although his physical body was with his teammates in the captured gun battery, his psychic self was high above, drifting invisibly over the team’s respective targets. “Come five degrees right on emplacement two,” Redhand added, his voice weak but clear. Although they had already made sighting observations for targeting several tactically valuable targets in and around Dutch Harbor during their march from the cliffs to Spithead, the dynamic atmospheric conditions necessitated the use of a forward observer to ensure the cannon rounds hit their intended targets. In his astral form, Redhead could observe all of the team’s planned targets almost simultaneously, instantaneously moving between them with the speed of thought and providing corrected targeting data based on where previous shots had fallen.
As two of the targeted gun emplacements were engulfed by the explosions and flames, Team Alpha’s captured guns spoke again. This time the emplacement that had previously avoided destruction was hit directly by a high explosive armor-piercing shell. It erupted in gouts of flame and smoke as the tons of explosive ammunition in its magazine detonated.
“You’re right on target, now,” Redhand affirmed.
“Put two more rounds into each emplacement,” Carter ordered. “Then start working through the target list.”
The town and harbor facilities had awakened into panicked chaos. Alarms of all types sent their piercing screams into the night. The thousands of enemy soldiers that garrisoned the town poured out of their barracks and tried to organize themselves. The long-oppressed civilians filled the streets as they tried to comprehend what was happening, some seizing the opportunity to attack the occupiers with whatever weapons came to hand.
The Alpha operators turned the guns toward the west. The 190mm shells found the building that housed the bulk of the enemy’s ammunition reserves and caused a pillar of flame, smoke and dust to burst hundreds of feet skyward. A second sun seemed to appear for several seconds as the store of ammunition that had been intended to supply ten thousand soldiers for three months of sustained combat was ignited. The whole island seemed to shake in the force of the blast. The following series o explosions continued to shake the ground and light the sky. Carter next ordered the guns to be turned on the huge fuel tanks that supplied the local airport.
“Two direct hits on the ammo dump. Up twenty meters on the fuel depot and fire for effect,” Redhand advised. The Alpha operators corrected their aim and fired again. The fuel depot exploded with flame and thunder that rivaled the still-exploding ammunition dump.
Team Alpha’s next victims were the Unalaska garrison’s divisional headquarters, several patrol boats that were moored in Dutch Harbor, the automated control center that directed the anti-ship missile batteries that ringed Unalaska and Amaknak Islands and lastly, the moorings supporting the anti-submarine nets across the bay’s entrance.
“Damn, that was fun!” McNamara exclaimed, patting the breech of one cannon fondly as Redhand’s astral form returned to his body. The Cheyenne rose shakily to his feet.
“Are you OK, Remo?” Carter asked Redhand.
Redhand nodded. “I just need a second or two,” he answered. “Talking when I’m out of body takes a lot out of me,” he explained.
Carter clapped the Cheyenne on the shoulder. “Good job,” Carter said. “All right, troopers, get set to blow these guns. The P.A.C.s First Regimental Combat Team is coming in just behind the storm along with Becky Pratt’s recon/raiders. We still have work to do.”
“And damage to cause,” McNamara added, attaching a demolition charge to the last cannon.
“Let’s go,” Carter said. “Brains is on point,” he added, looking at Sains. He pointed at Gurung. “Roller,” Carter said, using the Gurkah’s call sign. “You take the rear.”
Carter stood by the door as the team exited the gun emplacement, touching each operator’s shoulder as they passed him and assuring himself that each was accounted for. “Watch your fire discipline,” he advised. “Remember this town is full of American civilians that have been under occupation for years; be careful who you kill.” Two minutes later, the charges planted by McNamara detonated, consuming he gun emplacement in flames.
***
To minimize the effect of the diminishing, but still dangerous, winds, the transport planes were only five hundred feet above the small airstrip as the commandos made their jump. The three hundred paranormal commandos of the Paranormal Army Corps’ recon/raider battalion were on the ground and driving on the airport in less than five minutes. They detached their parachute harnesses while still thirty feet above the ground, avoiding the interval of vulnerability experienced by non-paranormal airborne troops as they disentangled themselves from their harnesses after a drop.
Having destroyed several machinegun positions and anti-aircraft gun emplacements that would have fired on the parachuting commandos they as made their jump, Team Alpha watched from the slopes of Mt. Ballyhoo to the north of the airport as the attacking commandos swept aside the European troops and fought their way northward toward the terminal and control tower. The airport’s defenders, although three times as numerous as the commandos, were overwhelmed by the speed and raw aggression shown by the assaulting force.
The paranormal raiders charged out of their landing zone, running at speeds impossible for normal troops. Their weapons, many times heavier and more powerful than those carried by the defending troops, gave each raider the personal lethality of a squad of normal human soldiers. They met barricades that would usually have required crew-served weapons, air support, armored vehicles, or explosives to overcome and simply leaping over them, destroying them with their specialized small arms or smashed them with hands and feet. The battle quickly became a rout. The rout became a slaughter. The airport was in the commandos’ control within fifteen minutes of their landing. Minutes later an American flag was hoisted up in front of the airport’s main terminal.
“Those, my friends, are some real bad-ass, steely-eyed soldiers,” McNamara observed.
“Becky Pratt is one of the best,” Carter agreed. “I tried to recruit her for the teams, but she wouldn’t leave her raiders.”
“The landing craft are in the bay,” Williams announced.
Carter turned to the southeast and activated the telescopic function of his multi-optic goggles. Half of the one hundred, eighty-foot long, manta-shaped infantry landing craft that comprised the first wave of the main invasion of Unalaska had surfaced in Iliuliuk Bay. The other half was rising to the surface in torrents of bubbles and froth. Machinegun, small arms and mortar fire assailed them from all sides; ricocheting off their armored hulls and sending plumes of water meters into the sky. Carter and his team had silenced the large artillery pieces surrounding the bay, the only weapons that had posed a real threat to the landing craft.
Launched an hour earlier by American warships behind the trailing edge of the storm that had covered Team Alpha’s insertion, each of the landing craft held thirty troops of the Paranormal Army Corps’ First Regimental Combat Team’s first battalion. The three hundred troops in the brigade’s first wave would secure several of Dutch Harbor’s largest docks. Those docks would then be used to unload the remaining two infantry regiments, a platoon of main battle tanks and a company of armored patrol vehicles from several larger but more vulnerable assault ships that would arrive within the hour.
As they surfaced, the landing craft inflated rubber skirting surrounding their hulls just above their water lines. Powerful turbo-fans at the tops of their hulls drew in air and forced it into the skirting, creating a cushion of air that lifted the great machines out of the water until they floated inches above its surface. Other fans mounted in nacelles at the rear of each landing propelled them across the water’s surface at speeds that were shocking for craft of such bulk.
Machineguns and automatic cannons mounted on both sides of each craft fired in continuous volleys to suppress opposition to their landing. As they surfaced, a turret-mounted 90mm cannon rose from a compartment at the bow of each landing craft. The weapons from the ten landing craft rained fire at the harbor’s defenders as they glided over the harbor’s surface and onto the beaches to disgorge their troops.
The soldiers streamed off of the beaches, supported by the guns of the landing craft. Fighter-bombers from offshore American aircraft carriers began to strike targets all over the islands while cruise missiles blasted away at pre-targeted enemy strong points. Stunned by the sudden arrival of such a large, heavily armed force, the bulk of the European troops scattered, many abandoning their weapons as they fled. Those who stood their ground were quickly surrounded and destroyed. In less than thirty minutes, the targeted docks were secured, a perimeter had been established around the harbor facilities and patrols were moving through Unalaska to reconnoiter for the soon-to-arrive reinforcements. Seeing the patrols in the streets, the shocked but jubilant residents of the long-occupied city began to emerge from hiding places to greet their liberators.
***
An American flag once again fluttered over Unalaska’s city hall. The building was dotted with bullet holes and one wall had been destroyed by an artillery shell’s near miss, but none of the people who had gathered around the building cared about the damage. The flag of their nation flew over their home again. Captured enemy soldiers not killed by the liberating forces were now bound and sitting dejectedly in long lines on the windswept beaches as their captors decided their fate.
The initially raucous celebration that had ensued as the island community had been secured had given way, at least temporarily, to a more solemn thanksgiving for hard-won liberty. The residents of Unalaska stood among the warriors who had delivered them from harsh, authoritarian occupation. Parents hugged their children; some so of them young that they had grown up under the boots of their occupiers and had never known freedom. The wind and rain could did not drive them indoors. They were breathing free air and no amount of chill or wind could make it smell less sweet.
Team Alpha stood silently some distance from the mass of soldiers and townspeople and watched as the Alaskan state flag was raised to fly just below the Stars and Stripes. They listened as Unalaska’s mayor addressed the crowd from the bed of a decades-old pickup truck, thanking the soldiers for their newly regained freedom and the people of Unalaska for their stubborn courage during the occupation. Finally, they watched as fireworks that were most likely brought by a farsighted soldier from the first R.C.T., streaked skyward and the crowd cheered and began to celebrate in earnest.
“We’ve helped to liberate little towns like this one from the Mississippi to San Francisco over the years,” Sains said, “but seeing this kind of shit just never gets old.”
Carter nodded. “No, it doesn’t.”
“Just once, though, it would be nice to stay around for the party and get a hug and a kiss from a grateful, pretty girl.” Sains remarked.
“That’s not what we do,” Carter said.
Sains shook his head. “I know, Boss. We’re the tier-one bad asses, the quiet professionals; the unsung and unseen heroes.”
Carter tilted his head. “Well, Brains, if you wanted glory, you should have been a fighter pilot.”
McNamara patted Carter’s shoulder. “This op wasn’t too bad, considering it was our first one after eighteen months of regrouping and reorganizing. Especially since so many of us were torn up in Brussels.”
“Everyone did a great job,” Carter agreed, turning toward the newest members of the team. “I was a little worried about going to ten operators per team from eight, but it worked out well.”
McNamara agreed. “Yeah, you new guys did okay, even the two rookies.”
The other members added their congratulations of the newest Alpha operators. Following successful but very costly raids of the World Central Authority’s two central military command centers in Brussels, Belgium, and Russia’s Ural mountains, the six FIRE teams had seen their numbers reduced by nearly fifty percent. This had necessitated a reorganization that redistributed the surviving operators among three ten-person teams instead of the of the six eight-operator units that had been the norm.
Redhand and Corey had been reassigned to Team Alpha from other FIRE Teams, while Gurung and Bristol, both former members of the P.A.C recon/raider battalion, had been placed with the team on probationary basis after a slightly accelerated training program. This had been their first operation with Team Alpha.
Carter shook each of the newcomer’s hands. “The four of you had your shit packed tight tonight; well done.”
He looked skyward as a VC-101 transport aircraft passed overhead toward the airport. “That’s our ride,” he said. “Let’s get over to the airport.”
Half an hour later, Team Alpha was aloft in the small transport plane. The pilot made a low pass of the still-celebrating crowd that had spilled out from the town’s center and now seemed to be flowing through every street and alley. Carter could see the throng of freedom-drunk people from the plane’s window. Every inch of the United States was now free of enemy occupiers.
He thought of his late wife, Monica. She had been one of the FIRE team operators killed in the raid on the W.C.A.s command centers. He smiled broadly for the first time in many months. Monica should be here for this, he thought. He imagined that his wife was indeed at his side, and in his mind’s eye, he could see her smiling.
Amaknak Island, Alaska 13, September 2106
Rain and wind seemed to be an ever-present fact in the Aleutian Islands. Wind rolled over the hills and through the valleys even as the almost almost-constant rain continued to soak an already saturated land. The wind drove the rain hard enough to sting the skin and made the chilly air feel truly cold. Never truly warm and always wet, it was a miserable place to be a soldier. The combination of being cold and wet made even the best, most attentive sentry less effective.
The sentries around the gun emplacement were no exception. Each of them had the hoods of their coats pulled as tightly as possible around their heads in an attempt to block out the chill and shield their faces from the stinging rain. The weather had made them focus on the memory of being warm and dry instead of being alert against attack and watching over sleeping comrades. The encompassing storm made it even more certain that their attention was on their own discomfort and not on their duty. They were certain that no enemy would, or could, attack in such weather.
FIRE Team Alpha had encountered no enemy patrol vessels when it landed in small boats on the island’s northern shore and had seen no infantry patrols as the team scaled the nine-hundred-foot Ulakta Head cliffs while fighting sixty-mile-per-hour winds. Also without incident, they had made their way over the mountainous terrain to Dutch Harbor. They moved through the driving winds and to their target, situated at the end of a long, thin strip of land that jutted out from the island and into Iliuliuk Bay; a place called Spithead.
It was a concession to the emplacement’s importance that the sentries were still outdoors and not sheltering inside the fortified structure. The four 190mm cannons in the emplacement’s gun battery were housed in an octagonal steel-reinforced synthetic granite bunker and commanded not only all of Iliuliuk Bay but all of Amaknak Island and much of neighboring Unalaska Island as well. This meant that although they were meant to destroy any enemy vessels that entered the harbor, the city of Unalaska and all of Dutch Harbor, as well as the community’s small airport, were also within range of the guns. The emplacement would be key to repelling any American invasion of the islands.
The city of Unalaska occupied all of Amaknak Island and a large part of neighboring Unalaska Island; it was largely built around Dutch Harbor and surrounded Iluiliuk Bay. The two islands were the last pieces of American territory occupied by forces that had once belonged to the now-defunct World Central Authority. When the Asian nations had withdrawn from the WCA, the Asian troops that had been fighting the Americans and their allies in Alaska had been withdrawn. The troops occupying the islands now were under the authority of the newly-reorganized European Union.
Dutch Harbor and its surroundings had been fortified and turned into the last bastion of globalist power on United States soil. It held both symbolic and strategic value. The two islands on which Dutch Harbor was located had been taken by foreign troops over a decade ago. Douglas Carter and his team were there to take them back.
With his more-than-human night vision, Carter watched as Brandon Williams, his second in command, approached the two sentries calmly, a long, black watch coat pulled tightly around his body. Tall and wraithlike, he moved with slow, deliberate intention.
The hood of his coat was pulled low over his eyes and his head was down as he walked against the driving wind. He had a European Union Army issue AN-2000 rifle slung over his shoulder along with its attendant bandolier of loaded magazines. He looked, for all intents and purposes, like another miserable sentry who had been forced to be outside when any sane person would be inside.
“What are you doing here?” the ranking sentry, a corporal, asked in Esperanto tinged in an Italian accent. “Our watch isn’t over for over an hour.” He barely raised his head to ask the question, sure that there would be a mundane explanation for the unexpected visitor.
“Orders,” Williams said, also speaking in the preferred globalist language of Esperanto. He was now within arm’s reach of both sentries.
“What orders?” the corporal asked, still not bothering to raise his eyes.
Williams struck him across the throat with the edge of his left hand and punched him in the chest with his right; shattering the windpipe and sternum, propelling him into the emplacement’s concrete wall hard enough to break his back. The sheer force of the blow to the chest fragmented his sternum, collapsed the man’s lungs and smashed his heart between the breast-bone and the spine. The corporal crumpled to the ground and gasped, without success, for breath.
Before the corporal’s brain had registered the pain of William’s fist blow, Williams hit the second guard in the nose with heel of his right palm, shattered his left knee with a lightning-fast kick and snapped his neck with an effortless twist of his head. The body hit the muddy ground with dull thud, joining the lifeless body of the corporal.
Williams discarded the captured coat and rifle as Carter and the other members of Team Alpha emerged from the storm-thickened night, revealing the same type of commando-black jumpsuit and tactical vest that his teammates wore. One of those teammates, Robert McNamara, a stout, bearded Canadian Sergeant, returned William’s own tactical hood, helmet and weapon. His sand-brown hair was briefly exposed to the wind and rain as he removed the coat and replaced it with his own hood and helmet before fitting a set of multi-optic goggles over his eyes.
All of Team Alpha’s operators were now fully clad in I.B.O.S., the Individual Battlefield Operation System. It was an infantry battle suit which combined various sensors, communication equipment, multi-chromatic camouflage, an automated emergency medical system, a battlefield computer, and armor protection against small arms fire into a single integrated unit. With the hood and goggles in place, the I.B.O.S. suit covered an operator from head to toe; leaving only his eyes, nose and chin exposed.
McNamara looked down at the lifeless forms of the two sentries and then at Williams. “Always a pleasure watching you work, Harvard,” the Canadian sergeant said to Williams, addressing him by his team call sign.
“Brains, did you get it?” Carter asked Gary Sains, a broad-shouldered, dark-haired American staff sergeant.
Sains answered to his own call sign. “Yep, I pulled out of the corporal’s pea-brain just as he breathed his last.”
“Get it open, then,” Carter ordered. Sains moved toward the bunker’s steel entrance door. “On it, boss,” he replied. Having used his telepathic abilities to take the seven-digit entry code directly out of the dying corporal’s mind, he entered the digits and paused with his finger over the ‘enter’ button. “Is everybody ready?” he asked.
McNamara stood at other side of the door’s threshold from Sains with a stun grenade ready in his hand. The grenade would momentarily incapacitate the enemy soldiers without risk of detonating the tons of ammunition stored within the bunker. Carter, Williams, and the other six team members formed lines on either side of the door; five operators on each side. Each placed a hand on the shoulder of the operator in front of him; each was ready to rush into the bunker an instant after McNamara’s grenade detonated.
Carter assured himself that his operators were ready to effect entry into the emplacement. “Execute!” he ordered.
The door slid open and McNamara tossed the grenade. Detonating at eye level, it produced a blinding white flash of light and thunderous crack that ruptured the unprotected eardrums of the soldiers inside, causing blood to ooze from their ears. Before the crew could even fully experience their pain, the Team Alpha operators were upon them; their own hearing had been protected by their noise-canceling headphones.
With a speed borne of endless repetition and training, the Alpha operators quickly cleared the threshold in a precise order, each operator moving alternately to the left and right and taking control of predetermined area of the room and killing any enemy troops in that area. Four enemy soldiers were dead in under one second.
Having cleared the room that served as the emplacement’s fire control center, the operators broke into two elements. One moved to storm the room that housed the emplacement’s gun battery while the other breached the door that led to the stairway which, in turn, led to the armored magazine housing the battery’s ammunition.
The door to the gun room burst open as the operators moved toward it. An aged, grizzled European Union sergeant was astonished to be confronted by an enemy soldier less than three feet away from him. He tried to raise his sidearm.
Without breaking stride, Okesa Nagura shot the old sergeant in his face. The bullet from her 4.8mm machine pistol plowed through the bridge of his nose and tore away the back of his skull. With brutal, cat-like grace, she kicked the corpse away as it fell, clearing the threshold so the body would not obstruct the team’s movements. She bounded over the body and rushed to the left along the gun room’s wall, shooting an enemy trooper as he tried to snatch up his rifle from where it had been leaning against a wall.
Milliseconds later, Sharron Roth shot another member of the gun crew as he attempted to rise from a chair in the corner to her right, the high-explosive round from her battle-rifle exploding inside his chest cavity and effectively hollowing out his upper torso.
The sound of Nagura’s gunfire had not faded before Jason Redhand, a tall, powerfully-built Cheyenne warrior, had darted through the doorway and fired two shots that struck the fourth gun-crewman as he tried in vain to raise his rifle to his shoulder. The sub-machine gun rounds struck the man’s chest and head, blasting them away from the upper torso.
Carter entered an eye-blink behind Redhand and shot the battery’s commander in his heart. Each operator then shouted “clear!,” indicating that any threats in their assigned sector of the room had been eliminated.
“Get the guns ready to load,” Carter ordered as he searched the battery commander’s body for any useful documents.
“On it, boss,” Redhand said as he and Roth opened the breeches on two of the massive cannons.
One floor below, a series of breaching charges exploded, weakening key stress points in the ammunition magazine’s vault-like door. McNamara kicked the weakened door off its hinges, charged through the threshold and moved to the right, firing a single round from his submachine gun into the head of an enemy trooper who was crouching behind the cradle of the large hydraulic hoist that was used to move the cannon shells from the ammunition magazine to the guns on the floor above.
To his right, Joan Corey put a three-shot burst from her machine-pistol into an enemy trooper who had fallen to his knees and was frantically trying to crawl across the six-foot distance to his dropped rifle. Corey’s rounds found their mark beneath his right armpit, their micro-explosive tips detonating deep in his body and destroying his heart and lungs.
The last of the magazine’s defenders was a short, boyish-looking man with the light of fanaticism in his eyes. He had hidden behind the rack that contained the propellant bags used to launch cannon projectiles; each bag contained seventy-five pounds of explosives. The fanatical enemy soldier had pulled the pin of a fragmentation grenade as McNamara had entered the magazine chamber, intending to detonate the ammunition within it, killing himself and his attackers.
Holding the grenade in his hand; he looked at it in astonishment when he realized that he was incapable of releasing his grip on the grenade’s striker lever. Until the lever was released, the grenade would not detonate. An unseen force held the soldier’s hand firmly closed around the hand-held bomb, rendering it harmless.
Tiffany Bristol; call sign Magic, kept her telekinetic power focused on the hand around the grenade, the power of her mind reaching across the room to do her will. The zealous enemy soldier glared at the African operator in frustration and awe.
In a blur of motion, Bishnu Gurung, a short but stoutly built Ghurkha Warrior from the mountains of Nepal, passed to her right. An instant later the grenade-holding soldier’s head, along with the hand holding the grenade, was cut from his body with two lightening-fast stokes from the Gurka’s signature curved, eighteen-inch long Kukri fighting knife. The head hit the floor with a pronounced thud and rolled for several feet. Bristol’s mental powers still held both the severed hand and the grenade suspended in mid-air.
Gurung searched the floor briefly for the grenade’s pin. He found it seconds later where the now-headless enemy soldier had discarded it. He calmly put the pin back into the grenade and then flashed Bristol an upturned thumb to single that it was safe for her to release her telekinetic hold. The Ghurkha had a broad grin and a somewhat disconcerting gleam in his eye as he shouted “Clear!”
“The magazine is secure,” Williams said from his post maintaining rear security at the magazine’s threshold.
“Good,” Carter responded. “They can start sending up the ammo now.”
Less than a minute later the hoist emerged from the magazine room through a trapdoor in the gun room’s floor with four, three hundred-pound projectiles and eight propellant bags. Carter, Redhand, Roth and Nagura began loading first two cannons using the electric conveyor belts at the base of each gun. As the breeches of the first two guns were slammed closed, McNamara and Gurung came up from the magazine and began loading the second pair of guns from ammunition on the hoist. Once emptied, the hoist returned to the lower level to be reloaded by Bristol and Corey.
McNamara slammed the breech of a gun closed. “We’re ready to fire, Boss.” he reported. “Why do I feel like reciting Charge of the Light Brigade?”
“Beats me,” Carter said. “That poem was about a cavalry unit and that unit was on the other side of the cannons. They were all but wiped out, too, if I recall correctly.”
Carter turned to Redhand, who was kneeling calmly with his hands on his knees. “Are you ready, Remo?” he asked.
Answering to his call sign, Redhand nodded, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes. His body took on a statue-like stillness; his breathing became deep and slow. “Ready,” he said. His voice was hollow and distant. His consciousness expanded, existing in many places at once. For Redhand, past, present, and future became one and the same.
“Fire,” Carter ordered.
The four cannons spat fire almost in unison. Miles away, the massive warheads exploded on or near the three additional artillery positions that bracketed Iliuliuk Bay.
“You’re on target for emplacements three, and four,” Redhand reported, seeing the impacts through trans-located psychic awareness. Although his physical body was with his teammates in the captured gun battery, his psychic self was high above, drifting invisibly over the team’s respective targets. “Come five degrees right on emplacement two,” Redhand added, his voice weak but clear. Although they had already made sighting observations for targeting several tactically valuable targets in and around Dutch Harbor during their march from the cliffs to Spithead, the dynamic atmospheric conditions necessitated the use of a forward observer to ensure the cannon rounds hit their intended targets. In his astral form, Redhead could observe all of the team’s planned targets almost simultaneously, instantaneously moving between them with the speed of thought and providing corrected targeting data based on where previous shots had fallen.
As two of the targeted gun emplacements were engulfed by the explosions and flames, Team Alpha’s captured guns spoke again. This time the emplacement that had previously avoided destruction was hit directly by a high explosive armor-piercing shell. It erupted in gouts of flame and smoke as the tons of explosive ammunition in its magazine detonated.
“You’re right on target, now,” Redhand affirmed.
“Put two more rounds into each emplacement,” Carter ordered. “Then start working through the target list.”
The town and harbor facilities had awakened into panicked chaos. Alarms of all types sent their piercing screams into the night. The thousands of enemy soldiers that garrisoned the town poured out of their barracks and tried to organize themselves. The long-oppressed civilians filled the streets as they tried to comprehend what was happening, some seizing the opportunity to attack the occupiers with whatever weapons came to hand.
The Alpha operators turned the guns toward the west. The 190mm shells found the building that housed the bulk of the enemy’s ammunition reserves and caused a pillar of flame, smoke and dust to burst hundreds of feet skyward. A second sun seemed to appear for several seconds as the store of ammunition that had been intended to supply ten thousand soldiers for three months of sustained combat was ignited. The whole island seemed to shake in the force of the blast. The following series o explosions continued to shake the ground and light the sky. Carter next ordered the guns to be turned on the huge fuel tanks that supplied the local airport.
“Two direct hits on the ammo dump. Up twenty meters on the fuel depot and fire for effect,” Redhand advised. The Alpha operators corrected their aim and fired again. The fuel depot exploded with flame and thunder that rivaled the still-exploding ammunition dump.
Team Alpha’s next victims were the Unalaska garrison’s divisional headquarters, several patrol boats that were moored in Dutch Harbor, the automated control center that directed the anti-ship missile batteries that ringed Unalaska and Amaknak Islands and lastly, the moorings supporting the anti-submarine nets across the bay’s entrance.
“Damn, that was fun!” McNamara exclaimed, patting the breech of one cannon fondly as Redhand’s astral form returned to his body. The Cheyenne rose shakily to his feet.
“Are you OK, Remo?” Carter asked Redhand.
Redhand nodded. “I just need a second or two,” he answered. “Talking when I’m out of body takes a lot out of me,” he explained.
Carter clapped the Cheyenne on the shoulder. “Good job,” Carter said. “All right, troopers, get set to blow these guns. The P.A.C.s First Regimental Combat Team is coming in just behind the storm along with Becky Pratt’s recon/raiders. We still have work to do.”
“And damage to cause,” McNamara added, attaching a demolition charge to the last cannon.
“Let’s go,” Carter said. “Brains is on point,” he added, looking at Sains. He pointed at Gurung. “Roller,” Carter said, using the Gurkah’s call sign. “You take the rear.”
Carter stood by the door as the team exited the gun emplacement, touching each operator’s shoulder as they passed him and assuring himself that each was accounted for. “Watch your fire discipline,” he advised. “Remember this town is full of American civilians that have been under occupation for years; be careful who you kill.” Two minutes later, the charges planted by McNamara detonated, consuming he gun emplacement in flames.
***
To minimize the effect of the diminishing, but still dangerous, winds, the transport planes were only five hundred feet above the small airstrip as the commandos made their jump. The three hundred paranormal commandos of the Paranormal Army Corps’ recon/raider battalion were on the ground and driving on the airport in less than five minutes. They detached their parachute harnesses while still thirty feet above the ground, avoiding the interval of vulnerability experienced by non-paranormal airborne troops as they disentangled themselves from their harnesses after a drop.
Having destroyed several machinegun positions and anti-aircraft gun emplacements that would have fired on the parachuting commandos they as made their jump, Team Alpha watched from the slopes of Mt. Ballyhoo to the north of the airport as the attacking commandos swept aside the European troops and fought their way northward toward the terminal and control tower. The airport’s defenders, although three times as numerous as the commandos, were overwhelmed by the speed and raw aggression shown by the assaulting force.
The paranormal raiders charged out of their landing zone, running at speeds impossible for normal troops. Their weapons, many times heavier and more powerful than those carried by the defending troops, gave each raider the personal lethality of a squad of normal human soldiers. They met barricades that would usually have required crew-served weapons, air support, armored vehicles, or explosives to overcome and simply leaping over them, destroying them with their specialized small arms or smashed them with hands and feet. The battle quickly became a rout. The rout became a slaughter. The airport was in the commandos’ control within fifteen minutes of their landing. Minutes later an American flag was hoisted up in front of the airport’s main terminal.
“Those, my friends, are some real bad-ass, steely-eyed soldiers,” McNamara observed.
“Becky Pratt is one of the best,” Carter agreed. “I tried to recruit her for the teams, but she wouldn’t leave her raiders.”
“The landing craft are in the bay,” Williams announced.
Carter turned to the southeast and activated the telescopic function of his multi-optic goggles. Half of the one hundred, eighty-foot long, manta-shaped infantry landing craft that comprised the first wave of the main invasion of Unalaska had surfaced in Iliuliuk Bay. The other half was rising to the surface in torrents of bubbles and froth. Machinegun, small arms and mortar fire assailed them from all sides; ricocheting off their armored hulls and sending plumes of water meters into the sky. Carter and his team had silenced the large artillery pieces surrounding the bay, the only weapons that had posed a real threat to the landing craft.
Launched an hour earlier by American warships behind the trailing edge of the storm that had covered Team Alpha’s insertion, each of the landing craft held thirty troops of the Paranormal Army Corps’ First Regimental Combat Team’s first battalion. The three hundred troops in the brigade’s first wave would secure several of Dutch Harbor’s largest docks. Those docks would then be used to unload the remaining two infantry regiments, a platoon of main battle tanks and a company of armored patrol vehicles from several larger but more vulnerable assault ships that would arrive within the hour.
As they surfaced, the landing craft inflated rubber skirting surrounding their hulls just above their water lines. Powerful turbo-fans at the tops of their hulls drew in air and forced it into the skirting, creating a cushion of air that lifted the great machines out of the water until they floated inches above its surface. Other fans mounted in nacelles at the rear of each landing propelled them across the water’s surface at speeds that were shocking for craft of such bulk.
Machineguns and automatic cannons mounted on both sides of each craft fired in continuous volleys to suppress opposition to their landing. As they surfaced, a turret-mounted 90mm cannon rose from a compartment at the bow of each landing craft. The weapons from the ten landing craft rained fire at the harbor’s defenders as they glided over the harbor’s surface and onto the beaches to disgorge their troops.
The soldiers streamed off of the beaches, supported by the guns of the landing craft. Fighter-bombers from offshore American aircraft carriers began to strike targets all over the islands while cruise missiles blasted away at pre-targeted enemy strong points. Stunned by the sudden arrival of such a large, heavily armed force, the bulk of the European troops scattered, many abandoning their weapons as they fled. Those who stood their ground were quickly surrounded and destroyed. In less than thirty minutes, the targeted docks were secured, a perimeter had been established around the harbor facilities and patrols were moving through Unalaska to reconnoiter for the soon-to-arrive reinforcements. Seeing the patrols in the streets, the shocked but jubilant residents of the long-occupied city began to emerge from hiding places to greet their liberators.
***
An American flag once again fluttered over Unalaska’s city hall. The building was dotted with bullet holes and one wall had been destroyed by an artillery shell’s near miss, but none of the people who had gathered around the building cared about the damage. The flag of their nation flew over their home again. Captured enemy soldiers not killed by the liberating forces were now bound and sitting dejectedly in long lines on the windswept beaches as their captors decided their fate.
The initially raucous celebration that had ensued as the island community had been secured had given way, at least temporarily, to a more solemn thanksgiving for hard-won liberty. The residents of Unalaska stood among the warriors who had delivered them from harsh, authoritarian occupation. Parents hugged their children; some so of them young that they had grown up under the boots of their occupiers and had never known freedom. The wind and rain could did not drive them indoors. They were breathing free air and no amount of chill or wind could make it smell less sweet.
Team Alpha stood silently some distance from the mass of soldiers and townspeople and watched as the Alaskan state flag was raised to fly just below the Stars and Stripes. They listened as Unalaska’s mayor addressed the crowd from the bed of a decades-old pickup truck, thanking the soldiers for their newly regained freedom and the people of Unalaska for their stubborn courage during the occupation. Finally, they watched as fireworks that were most likely brought by a farsighted soldier from the first R.C.T., streaked skyward and the crowd cheered and began to celebrate in earnest.
“We’ve helped to liberate little towns like this one from the Mississippi to San Francisco over the years,” Sains said, “but seeing this kind of shit just never gets old.”
Carter nodded. “No, it doesn’t.”
“Just once, though, it would be nice to stay around for the party and get a hug and a kiss from a grateful, pretty girl.” Sains remarked.
“That’s not what we do,” Carter said.
Sains shook his head. “I know, Boss. We’re the tier-one bad asses, the quiet professionals; the unsung and unseen heroes.”
Carter tilted his head. “Well, Brains, if you wanted glory, you should have been a fighter pilot.”
McNamara patted Carter’s shoulder. “This op wasn’t too bad, considering it was our first one after eighteen months of regrouping and reorganizing. Especially since so many of us were torn up in Brussels.”
“Everyone did a great job,” Carter agreed, turning toward the newest members of the team. “I was a little worried about going to ten operators per team from eight, but it worked out well.”
McNamara agreed. “Yeah, you new guys did okay, even the two rookies.”
The other members added their congratulations of the newest Alpha operators. Following successful but very costly raids of the World Central Authority’s two central military command centers in Brussels, Belgium, and Russia’s Ural mountains, the six FIRE teams had seen their numbers reduced by nearly fifty percent. This had necessitated a reorganization that redistributed the surviving operators among three ten-person teams instead of the of the six eight-operator units that had been the norm.
Redhand and Corey had been reassigned to Team Alpha from other FIRE Teams, while Gurung and Bristol, both former members of the P.A.C recon/raider battalion, had been placed with the team on probationary basis after a slightly accelerated training program. This had been their first operation with Team Alpha.
Carter shook each of the newcomer’s hands. “The four of you had your shit packed tight tonight; well done.”
He looked skyward as a VC-101 transport aircraft passed overhead toward the airport. “That’s our ride,” he said. “Let’s get over to the airport.”
Half an hour later, Team Alpha was aloft in the small transport plane. The pilot made a low pass of the still-celebrating crowd that had spilled out from the town’s center and now seemed to be flowing through every street and alley. Carter could see the throng of freedom-drunk people from the plane’s window. Every inch of the United States was now free of enemy occupiers.
He thought of his late wife, Monica. She had been one of the FIRE team operators killed in the raid on the W.C.A.s command centers. He smiled broadly for the first time in many months. Monica should be here for this, he thought. He imagined that his wife was indeed at his side, and in his mind’s eye, he could see her smiling.