The Assault Page 4

  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.

  [0430 hours]

  [Officers’ Quarters, Republican Guard HQ, Uluru Military Base]

  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.

  “Pukes are not gonna conquer the world, dude,” Wilton said. “We’re gonna kick their asses back to Mars.”

  “They aren’t from Mars, you plonker,” Hunter said.

  “Price, there’s just one problem with your theory,” Chisnall said.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “The Pukes are all vegetarians.”

  “Not true, sir,” Price said.

  “Then why are we eating green slime and not roasting a koala over a fire for dinner?” asked Chisnall.

  “That’s just what they want us to think,” Price said. “Until the pie factory is ready.”

  “Koala pie sounds good,” Monster said.

  “There’s no reason for the mission,” Wilton contributed. “It’s just a test of our disguises. The brass wants to find out if we can really fool the Pukes. We’re guinea pigs.”

  “Don’t believe everything you think,” Brogan said.

  “Just stay focused on your sector,” Chisnall said, shaking his head.

  “So what’s your plan to get us in, skipper?” Hunter asked. “Just going to rock on up to the front door and knock?”

  “Specialist Huntington, that part of the plan is way above your security level,” Chisnall replied. Now Hunter was asking “innocent” questions.

  “Why’s that, then?” Hunter asked.

  “I can’t answer that,” Chisnall said.

  “Why not?”

  “That’s also above your security level.”

  “Why wouldn’t they just let us in?” Wilton asked. “We look like Pukes. We sound like Pukes.”

  “You smell like puke,” Price added.

  “As far as they know, we are Pukes,” Wilton said. “Why can’t we just waltz on in?”

  “If they DNA test us, we be behind bars in two seconds,” Monster said.

  “If they DNA tested you, you’d be in a zoo,” Hunter said.

  “They won’t,” Chisnall said. “There are hundreds of thousands of Pukes wandering around this part of the desert. It’s their biggest military base. They don’t have time to DNA test everyone. And besides, why would they?”

  “I heard that, genetically, we’re only one percent different from the Pukes,” Wilton said.

  “Yeah, well, genetically, we’re only one percent different from chimpanzees, but you don’t see me climbing trees and eating bananas with my feet,” Hunter said.

  “Yeah,” Wilton said, “but don’t it make you wonder how a species that evolved on another planet, hundreds of light-years away, could share our DNA?”

  “Wilton, a lot of scientists with brains a lot bigger than yours are trying to work that out as we speak,” Chisnall said. “What those scientists are not doing is tabbing through the Australian desert, watching your sector.”

  “Are we there yet?” Hunter asked.

  The first enemy aircraft appeared above Mount Morris just as light was beginning to color the eastern sky.

  “Air mobile on the scope,” Price said, long before they could see or hear the craft. “Slow mover.”

  “Cover, cover, cover,” Chisnall said. “Radio silence until Phantom gives us the all clear.”

  He flipped his own camo sheet off the top of his backpack and spread it out quickly on the ground. It immediately picked up the colors and patterns of what was underneath it, and he locked them in before sliding underneath.

  They had been walking on rock that was reddish in some places, a mix of gray and yellow in others. From above, even from a few feet away, he would appear only as a mound of rock.

  There was a viewing hole near each corner of the blanket, just a pinhole. He put his eye to the closest one and waited. He could hear the craft now. It was going to pass close overhead. There was just enough light in the sky for him to see it.

  It was a rotorcraft, the Puke equivalent of a helicopter, although the blades were below and internal, giving the appearance of a large saucer in the sky.

  The sudden appearance of the craft worried him. Were they searching for his team? Did they know about the mission? A rotorcraft in this part of the desert had to be looking for something.

  It moved off slowly to the southwest. Price’s voice came over the comm a few minutes later with the all clear. Chisnall sat up and folded his camo sheet. Around him, five rocky lumps morphed into soldiers.

  “One more klick and we’ll be near the river,” Chisnall said. “We should make that easily before it gets too light. There’s a small depression in the rock below a cliff face. We’ll camp there during the daylight hours. It’ll give us some shadow, and a bit of cover.”

  At the dry riverbed, they t
reated themselves to a meal of the alien food-in-a-tube and a self-heating drink sachet that tasted like blood.

  Chisnall checked his GPS. They had covered over thirty kilometers. Good going for the first night. His legs and back were aching and he dry-swallowed a painkiller.

  “Wilton, take the first watch,” he said. “Then Price, Hunter, Brogan. Monster, you take the last.”

  Nods and grunts acknowledged the instruction. Chisnall looked around the faces of the team, spending longer on Price than the others. Did he trust her to take watch? Did he trust any of them? Not after what had happened. But there was no choice. Watch had to be kept, and if he left out any of the team, that would just make his suspicions plain.

  The sun was stretching its arms on the eastern horizon, and with the day came the bush flies. Clouds of them, unbothered by waving hands or insect repellent. They went for the eyes, nose, and mouth—anything moist.

  Chisnall watched Monster squeeze a hefty amount of green goo into his mouth from the tube. Flies covered his lips and would occasionally dart inside when he opened his mouth. It didn’t seem to worry Monster. He just kept on chewing, only stopping to grin at Chisnall with teeth covered in green with tiny black flecks.

  Chisnall gave up trying to eat in the open air and retreated under his camo sheet. Squashing the flies that came under with him, he ate his meal in the cool darkness beneath. He had chosen his position carefully—against the cliff face, in a small V-shaped ridge slightly away from the others.

  The rock was hard, but they each had a self-inflating sleeping bag. After eating, Chisnall lay facedown on top of his. He tried lying on his back, but a wash of fiery pain quickly changed his mind. Facedown was a little more comfortable and he could easily have slept, but didn’t. He didn’t even bother taking off his body armor. He lay down as if sleeping but kept his eye to one of the pinholes. If anyone approached with murder on their mind, he would be ready.

  The day began. The heat rose. Even under the thermal camo sheet, it became uncomfortably hot. Chisnall sipped water to keep hydrated and tried to stretch the pain out of his back and legs. He kept one hand on his sidearm, just in case.