The Assault Read online

  “Chiiiznaaal!”

  “Ryyyaaan!”

  One of them moved in for the kill, a dim oval sharpening into eyes, a nose, and fangs that flashed toward his neck.

  Except it wasn’t aiming for his neck.

  The lips sealed on his in a warm, salty kiss that was damp and tasted slightly of peppermint. A flood of hot, moist air flooded his chest. The pressure was too much. He couldn’t breathe. Then the lips were gone and the pressure released and the air fled from his lungs.

  Again the lips closed on his own, but this time when the pressure released, he found the muscles that controlled his tongue and used them.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, realizing that at best it was a blurry mumble. “I’m not dead!”

  At that moment, pain hit him everywhere, all at once, a cacophony of agony.

  Then the oval shape was back, not covering his face this time but next to it. Soft hands had found their way around his neck and were pulling him—no, just holding him, which sent the pain to a whole new level. But he said nothing and just felt the curves of the body cradling his. The face pulled away and he saw it was Sergeant Brogan, Holly Brogan.

  “Are you okay, Lieutenant?” she asked.

  He hated the way Brogan said that. “Leff-tenant.” There were no f’s in lieutenant. Why couldn’t Australians speak proper English?

  “What’s your status, Lieutenant?”

  He tested his arms, then his legs. They all seemed to work. That meant his back was okay as well. He reached up to his head, and his helmet came away in pieces in his hands. It had done exactly what it was supposed to do. It had absorbed the shock, destroying itself in the process but saving his life.

  His back was on fire, as were his legs. In fact, his whole body felt like he had just gone twelve rounds in the ring against Easton Bunker, the battalion boxing champion, and he knew he’d be black and blue the next day. But nothing felt broken. The combat body armor he was wearing beneath his flight suit probably had something to do with that.

  “What’s your status, Lieutenant?” Brogan repeated.

  “Oscar Kilo,” Chisnall said weakly. “Oscar Kilo.”

  He was lying on the floor of the desert. More accurately, he was lying in the floor of the desert. Embedded in it. The first impact he had felt had been the surface of the landing pad. The second had been when he made a small crater in the sand of the desert. As much as the partially inflated half-pipe, it had been the soft sand of Australia herself that had saved him.

  The other members of the team were also there, gathered over him.

  “Cheese and rice, LT,” Monster said. “You one lucky son of a bitch.”

  “They don’t call him Lieutenant Lucky for nothing,” Hunter said.

  He felt a gentle hand on his forehead. Brogan was leaning over him again, her eyes close to his, looking at his pupils for signs of concussion. Her hands felt their way around his head, pressing gently on his skull. He felt her breath on his cheek. “Are you injured, Leff-tenant?” Brogan asked. She was unclipping his body armor, her fingers probing his arms, his legs.

  He said nothing and just let her do her work, feeling the pressure, the pain, as her fingertips explored the damaged areas of his body.

  Brogan was the perfect soldier: highly trained and cold as ice. But inside her somewhere he knew there was a pretty normal sixteen-year-old girl. Someone with feelings. Some of them for him.

  Chisnall shook his head and sat upright, ignoring the shriek of protest from his back. He rolled to one side and stood up on limbs that did not want to hold him. Brogan lent him an arm for support while he steadied himself.

  He looked around. It was not as dark in the desert as he expected. Even without his night-vision gear, he could see the shape of mountains to the northeast. The desert floor itself seemed almost luminescent.

  A whole night’s tabbing lay ahead of them. That was not going to be fun or easy with the state of his back and legs. But nobody had ever said this mission was going to be easy.

  Each of them recovered their own gear, hauling in the fabric of the half-pipes in huge armfuls. Chisnall’s was still in one piece, although the casing had split open on contact with the desert, spilling the contents all around. The fabric of his landing pad was a large, tightly packed wad. While the others were busy with their gear, he levered open the control hatch with his utility knife, using his flashlight to peer inside.

  The trigger in the unit’s nose cone should have fired a small explosive to blow the end off the main air cylinder and inflate the pad. The trigger mechanism, although mangled by the crash, looked functional. It was a very simple switch; there was not much that could go wrong with it.

  The miniature motherboard was in pieces and there was little point in even looking at that. But if the motherboard was faulty, the system would not have shown as ready. He traced the wires along to the detonator. They looked fine. He slit open the left wire with his knife, exposing the metal core. Nothing wrong there. He slit open the right cable and gritted his teeth slightly.

  There it was. Impossible to spot by visual inspection. The metal core of the wire had been removed and replaced with a narrow filament of fuse wire. It would conduct electricity and pass all the circuit tests, but as soon as a high voltage was applied to set off the detonator, it would melt, breaking the circuit. A gap in the wire testified that that was exactly what had happened.

  Somebody wanted him dead.

  A FACC-E (free-fall air-cushioned container—equipment) had dropped with them. They spread out to search for its signal with their locator packs, with Hunter and Price staying put to dig a big pit in the sand.

  “Got it, LT.” Monster’s normally huge, booming voice was unusually quiet on the comm, reminding Chisnall that they were deep behind enemy lines.

  Monster and Wilton brought it in, and they all retrieved the gear they would need for the mission. Night-vision goggles. Bzadian helmets and weapons. Backpacks full of supplies. Everything that had been too dangerous or too heavy to carry with them on the half-pipe drop.

  Into the pit went all the half-pipes and cylinders, along with their flight suits and helmets. Brogan tossed in a thermite grenade on a ten-minute timer, and they hurried to fill the pit in, completely burying the gear before they heard the sizzle and felt the heat of the explosion through the sand.

  Chisnall slid on his NV goggles and looked around at his team. They stood in a circle, fully kitted up, fully armed.

  “God, you’re ugly,” he said.

  Each member of the team had had bone extensions added to their skulls to give their heads the elongated “corn kernel” shape of the aliens. Their skin had been discolored with chemicals that would take years to fade, giving them the mottled green and yellow skin of the alien invaders.

  The alien combat helmets they wore were slightly elongated, with a metal rim forming a visor at the front. They also came lower over the ears than most human styles of helmets. The body armor was black and ridged in odd places. Markings on their armor identified them as members of the Bzadian 35th Scout Battalion. Satellite surveillance gave them a good picture of which Bzadian unit was where, and the 35th Scouts had been transferred to Uluru from Perth just the day before.

  “Yeah, and you look like something I once left on the sick bay floor at school,” Price said, sticking out her forked tongue at him. They had all had the operation, splitting the ends of their tongues in two, like a snake’s. Physically at least, they were alien soldiers—“Pukes.” So named because their skin looked like the contents of a vomit bag.

  “We going kill scumbugz, yezzz,” Wilton said in a thick Bzadian accent, effortlessly imitating the strange, buzzing speech of the aliens. “Going kill lotz scumbugz. This our planet now.”

  Chisnall smiled briefly and pulled a GPS mapping tablet out of his top utility pocket, wincing as the muscles in his back and arm objected to the movement. A flashing orange light indicated their position, and a steady green light showed the location of their
target.

  “We made good distance,” he said. “GPS shows us less than two hundred klicks from our target.”

  “Dude, that is, like, forever,” Wilton muttered.

  “Yeah, and if we’d bailed when you first started whining, it would have been four hundred klicks,” Brogan said.

  Chisnall nodded. Every extra second on the aircraft was almost a kilometer closer to the target.

  “Okay, we’re Oscar Mike in five. We’ll head east until we strike the riverbed,” he said. “We’ll follow that north, past Mount Morris. Cross the highway and tab overland past Benda Hill up to Uluru. We should do it in four days, if you ladies don’t want to stop for a manicure and a back massage.”

  “Hear that, Wilton?” Price asked. “No more manicures for you.”

  “Are we there yet?” Hunter grinned.

  “You do that all the way, Hunter, and I’m going to hand you over to the Pukes myself,” Brogan said.

  “Daddy, Mummy’s picking on me,” Hunter said.

  Chisnall ignored him. “Price, did your scope survive the drop okay?”

  “Fully functional,” Price said.

  The scope was a handheld radar system carried by Bzadian soldiers. Theirs had come from a POW.

  “Okay, don’t take your eyes off it,” Chisnall said. “First sign of enemy mobiles, ground or air, and we hit the deck. Cover yourself with your camo sheet and do not move. Is that clear?”

  “Not even to scratch arse?” Monster asked.

  “They won’t see you under your camo, and their thermals won’t pick you up either. But they will pick up movement. Once you’re down, you don’t move a muscle, even if a dingo starts chewing on your leg.”

  “Rules of engagement, skipper?” Brogan asked.

  Chisnall looked at her. “We’re in enemy territory,” he said. “There are no friendlies here. We might encounter alien civilians; we might encounter children. If it has a gun, then you are cleared to engage. But remember: as far as anyone knows, we are Bzadian soldiers. We don’t want to fire unless fired upon.”

  He tucked away the tablet and stood up, looking around again at the vast nothingness of the Australian desert.

  “Okay, weapons check,” he said. “Hunter, check the laser comms unit too. We’re in trouble if that didn’t survive the drop.”

  They couldn’t afford to use radio to communicate with base. The chances of the Bzadians picking up the transmissions were just too great. The laser comms unit fired a precise burst of laser energy at an exact spot in the sky, where a geo-stationary satellite was ready to receive it. It was completely undetectable unless you happened to be in the path of the beam, and since it transmitted for microseconds at a time, that was highly unlikely.

  Chisnall checked his own weapons, starting with his coil-gun, a stubby-looking Bzadian rifle that used magnetic fields rather than explosive propellant to fire projectiles. Underneath was a stubby grenade launcher that held two grenades. The rifle clipped onto a spring-loaded bracket across his back. He hit the release button on his right shoulder and the weapon instantly swung up over his shoulder and into his waiting hands. He moved the gun back over his shoulder, ignoring the protests from his back, and felt the automatic holster grab it from him. His sidearm was a needle-gun. It fired long, narrow needles that had incredible range and accuracy.

  The others all indicated their weapons were okay.

  “Diagnostics on the laser comms all read positive,” Hunter said. “We’re good to go.”

  “Good,” Chisnall said. “Send the first signal now: ‘All down safely, proceeding to the first waypoint.’ ”

  “All down safely, proceeding to the first waypoint.” Hunter confirmed the message before keying it in. He unfolded tripodlike legs from the unit and found a relatively flat place to put it. When he activated it, the laser swiveled, automatically orienting itself to a signal from the satellite. There was a brief flash from the top of the unit.

  “Message sent and confirmed received,” Hunter said. He packed away the comms unit into his backpack.

  “Okay, we’re Oscar Mike. Tactical column. Hunter, you’re on point,” Chisnall said. “Everybody, focus on your sectors. Price’s scope won’t necessarily pick up foot mobiles. Use your NV and watch for any sign of movement.”

  Hunter set a brisk pace. Chisnall followed at the rear of the team, struggling on leaden legs. Six Pukes tabbing through the middle of the desert. That was what they looked like. Whether it would be enough to fool any spotters that happened to see them, he wasn’t sure.

  He didn’t dwell on it. There were other things on his mind.

  Someone wanted him dead.

  He had spent an hour in Angel Chariot’s bomb bay before the mission, personally checking all the half-pipes, including the wires. They had all been fine. After that, the plane had been under heavy guard. Chisnall had been told to expect trouble on this mission. It wasn’t specified, but it was clear that no one was to be trusted. No one.

  But the traitor had made their way into a top-secret, heavily guarded hangar, levered open the control unit, replaced the wire, and closed the unit, right under the noses of the guards. It would have taken a ghost to do that.

  The sheer audacity of it was unbelievable.

  Only six people apart from him had access to that hangar. One of them, the pilot of Angel Chariot, had died over the Australian desert.

  The other five were all here with him.

  3. OSCAR MIKE

  [MISSION DAY 2]

  [0120 hours]

  [Central Australia]

  CHISNALL STARTED THE NEXT DAY WITH A LIST OF FIVE suspects, but by the end of the day he was able to narrow it down to four.

  It was a simple process of elimination.

  His team was the best of the best. They had been selected from the top recruits at the 4th Reconnaissance Team base at Fort Carson, Colorado.

  Even to get chosen to go to Fort Carson was an honor, although none of them had known it at the time. The initial selection process was a simple one: paintball. With the military’s backing, paintball had grown from a minor pursuit to the largest sport in the Americas. Those who showed consistent ability, intelligence, and stamina were selected for an initial screening, using ICP modeling and genetic testing to determine their final height. If they were likely to grow tall, they were not selected. If, after all the screening, they grew too tall anyway, they were dropped from the program.

  After the first year, recruits who showed leadership qualities were put through an officer’s program. They still had to undergo all the physical and military training of the other recruits, but on top of that, they had hours of study in leadership, strategies, and tactics.

  Chisnall had topped the officer program. It had been a surprise to everyone, most of all him. All the smart money had been on Bryan Brown, a loud, tough, and competent football player from Iowa. Chisnall was nothing like Bryan. He was not even particularly noticeable, with a slight (but wiry) build, sandy hair, and nondescript features. He did not look special. But according to his personnel file, he quietly, and with a minimum of fuss, got on with the job, bringing an extraordinary intelligence and an ability to solve problems to the tasks at hand. Right now, he would have laughed to see that note in his file; his intelligence and problem-solving ability seemed to have completely deserted him. One of his team was a traitor, and he had no idea who.

  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.