Task Force (10 page)

Chisnall jumped up, ignoring the bullets, and slid into the seat of the weapon station. He punched the button for Target A and squeezed the triggers on the Bushmaster controls in one fluid movement. In an eruption of flame and smoke, one of the Land Rovers leaped up into the air, then out over the far
edge of the wharf, the gunner cartwheeling off into the water. Overhead, Wilton’s rifle boomed again and Chisnall saw the Bzadian sergeant drop with a surprised look on his face. He switched to Target B. The Land Rover was racing forward, trying to get to the stern of the ship, out of the big gun’s zone of fire. It was shooting as it went. Bullets were ripping the wall to shreds all around Chisnall. On the screen in front of him, the electronic target indicator settled on the Land Rover and stayed there, a pipping sound indicating that the target was locked in. He squeezed the trigger just as the weapons console exploded around him, disintegrating as he ducked and tried to shield his face with his arms, metal and glass flying past him. Something smashed into his head.

The lights went out.

Price’s gun was steady. The door at the far end of the corridor burst open and a burly Bzadian soldier burst through it, a flashlight glaring from the barrel of his coil-gun.

The flashlight and the weapon were aimed high and he never had a chance. Lying on the floor, her pistol aimed through a crack in the inner door, Price shot him once in the chest, lining up the next soldier even as the first collapsed, unconscious, in a cloud of puffer smoke. The second soldier, a gaunt female, stopped in her tracks as the round exploded on her armor. She stood motionless for a second; then her eyes rolled back in her head and she fell backward into the arms of the soldier behind her.

Monster was standing over Chisnall, helping him to his feet, and although he was speaking, Chisnall could not hear the words. His face felt numb and when he looked down, he saw the ruins of the weapons station lying on the floor around him. The fifty-caliber rounds must have hit just as he fired the Bushmaster.

He raced out to the deck and saw the wreckage of the second Land Rover upside down, burning on the edge of the wharf.

“We’ve got to get to Price,” Chisnall said, his voice falling thickly on his own ears.

Weapons appeared around the edge of the door, the thunder of the coil-guns vibrating the air in the corridor. Price rolled to the left as a line of bullets cut holes in the floor where she had been lying. A grenade would have sorted things out quickly, she reflected, but would have also damaged the plant equipment. The stutter of the weapons was continuous now and impossibly loud, echoing off the smooth round surfaces of the corridor as the Bzadian troops advanced behind a shield of bullets.

She kicked the door shut. There was no way out. In just a few seconds they would burst through that door, and she would only have a puffer pistol and a can of Puke spray against a horde of deadly coil-guns.

Price rolled up onto her feet and leaped, catlike, onto the
control panel for the backup power supply. Stretching out, she sprang across to the main power plant, a huge machine in the center of the room. Her toes scrabbled for a hold on a narrow grille on the side of the machine as she tried to pull herself over the edge. Something on her belt was jammed on the top lip of the machine, but after a moment it came loose and fell to the floor with a metallic clatter. The can of Puke spray. It rolled over to the wall and came to a halt by the door. That left her with just the pistol.

She flattened herself on top of the machine as the door smashed open.

The plastic ceiling of the dome reflected the flashlights of a crowd of Bzadians bursting in, guns aimed in all directions. It would only take them a few seconds to realize that she wasn’t on the floor, and only a few seconds more to work out where she must be.

Price slid forward, hoping to escape through the door. No luck. Two soldiers stood blocking the exit. The others had spread out inside the dome.

One of the soldiers by the door noticed the spray can wedged against the wall, and without lowering his weapon, reached down and picked it up.

Take a sniff, you dirty Puke
, Price thought. She considered shooting the can, but she knew that the compressed powder of the puffer bullets would not be strong enough to penetrate the metal skin.

Behind her, a soldier climbed loudly up to her hiding place.
She twisted around just as a coil-gun appeared over the edge, followed by the face of the soldier who carried it. Price kicked at the barrel as the coil-gun fired, feeling the wind of the bullet’s passage, missing her by inches. She grabbed at the barrel of the gun, then kicked again, aiming for the Bzadian’s face, feeling the crunch of a broken nose. She wrenched the gun off its cable spring as he fell backward.

It was the only shot she had. It was her only chance, the only time she would have. A matter of seconds that would determine whether she lived or died, right here, right now.

In one clean movement she rolled to the front of the machine, brought the weapon to bear, and squeezed the trigger.

The shot hit the can slightly off center, the metal bullet puncturing it cleanly on both sides and punching it out of the soldier’s hands. A white mist filled the room and spread through the open door into the access tube. The room filled with an eerie silence.

They found Price lying in a room full of peppermint haze, surrounded by staring Bzadian soldiers whose eyes flicked constantly and whose expressions spat hatred without a muscle moving in their faces. She had crawled toward the door but hadn’t made it. She was semiconscious and retching, but alive.

“I’ll go get her,” the Tsar said.

“Don’t be a hero,” Chisnall said. “Wait till we can find a gas mask or ventilate the room. It’s not safe.”

“I’ll go,” Monster said.

“Wait …,” Chisnall began, but there was no arguing. From the look on Monster’s face, nobody was going to stop him.

So it was Monster who held his breath and entered the corridor to the plant room while the others secured the rest of the complex, rounding up the technicians and operators and keeping them under guard in a meeting room, subduing those who tried to resist with puffer bullets and Puke spray.

And it was Monster who emerged from the corridor with Price over his large shoulders and laid her tenderly on the floor in the entrance pod, where the air was clearest. He wiped vomit from her lips, checked her vital signs, and gently stroked her forehead. When he put his ears to her lips to listen to her breathing, her hand slipped around the back of his neck and pulled him close. Monster didn’t pull away.

When focus finally returned to her eyes, they were all gathered around her. The SONRAD facility was secure and the remainder of the soldiers down at the wharf had been rescued from the sea, disarmed, cuffed, and placed in the meeting room with the others.

Monster stood back as Price took in the faces that hovered over her.

“Are you okay?” Chisnall asked.

Price tried to laugh, but it came out as a cough. “Happy New Year,” she said.

Chisnall checked the time. It was after midnight.

“Happy New Year, Price,” he said.

FROM THE FIRST PROPOSAL TO THE TRANSPORT SHIPS
arriving off the Australian coast, Operation Magnum had taken just three weeks.

The task force was made up of seventy amphibious Marine Personnel Carriers (MPCs) carrying 1,200 soldiers: US Marines, Canadian Black Devils, Russian Spetsnaz, and German Kommando Spezialkrafte. In addition, there were three British L118 artillery pieces and ten Chinese T-63a amphibious tanks (although only nine actually made it ashore).

The Bzadians had chosen Lowood as the site of the fuel-processing plant due to its proximity to the mighty Wivenhoe Dam, which provided the constant high-volume supply of both water and electricity that was vital to the production of the cells.

Experts had ruled out an attack on the dam. Wivenhoe was a huge earthen embankment, safe from anything short of
a nuclear bomb. The massive metal gates, among the largest in the world, were almost indestructible and heavily defended.

Instead, the plan called for the task force to infiltrate Bzadian territory through the Brisbane River. Amphibious vehicles, mostly submerged and cloaked by an artificial mist, would have to navigate nearly a hundred miles of river in the pitch-black, without being detected. Power stations had to be knocked out. Sonar and radar had to be eliminated.

The other problem was the moon. For the operation to succeed, it would have to take place during a new moon, when the Brisbane River would be in darkness. Only one date met all the criteria: December 31, 2031.

“TASK FORCE ACTUAL, THIS IS ANGEL ONE. VIPER CHANNEL
is open.”

“Angel One, this is Task Force Actual. Please confirm your last.”

“Angel One, confirming Viper Channel is open. How copy?”

“Solid copy, Angel One, good work. Our ETA is approximately ten mikes.”

Against all odds they had done it. The route into New Bzadia was open. It was only the first step on a long and precarious path, but still it gave Chisnall hope that somehow they would be able to achieve the impossible.

Monster was still tending to Price while Wilton checked out the speedboat they had seen moored at the wharf. Barnard was guarding the prisoners and the Tsar was monitoring the communications room.

Chisnall had barely finished talking to the task force command when the Tsar’s voice sounded in his ear.

“Where are you, Big Dog? I got Pukes on the line.”

Chisnall took a deep breath. The SONRAD complex had been off-line for less than ten minutes, but that was long enough for the local command center to investigate. He hurried to the communications room. He had been expecting the call and had already changed into the uniform of a plant operator.

“Verification key gen up and running?” he asked.

“Ready to rock and ready to roll,” the Tsar said.

Chisnall punched a button on the desk. A video screen sprang to life. His momentary nervousness eased. He could pass himself off as a Bzadian. He knew that. The years of training back at Fort Carson, the surgical operations to recolor his skin, to change the shape of his skull, and to fork his tongue made certain that he looked and acted like one of them. An alien. And the disguise had been well tested in the red sands of the Australian desert.

“SONRAD communications. I am Chizel,” he said.

“I am Major Zara Kriz from the Coastal Defense Command,” a female said. She appeared efficient and competent. It was the same voice he had heard on board the ship, with the same slightly odd accent. He hoped she didn’t recognize his
voice. He tried to speak in a lower register and quickly changed his accent to one of the other Bzadian races, which had their own peculiar way of making the buzzing sound that was a feature of all Bzadian languages. It was a softer, quicker buzz, and it felt odd on his tongue, but he had practiced it many times in training.

“Where is Hez?” Kriz asked. “I was speaking to him earlier.”

“Shift change,” Chisnall said.

“I see. Chizel, please identify,” Kriz said, making a note.

“Of course,” Chisnall said, and removed one of his ID tubes, inserting it into a scanner below the video screen. It was a perfect fake.

“Confirmed,” Kriz said as the tube scanned in her system. “We had an interrupted feed from SONRAD a few minutes ago.”

“Our apologies,” Chisnall said, covering his face briefly with his hands. “A circuit protector tripped in the electricity plant.”

That was a reasonable excuse. It was also, of course, totally false. They had had to take the SONRAD facility off-line while the Tsar replaced vital circuits in the systems with ones that were programmed to ignore the task force vessels.

“And the backup power?”

“That failed under the sudden load,” Chisnall said. “The techs restored it and are reviewing the backup power system to find out why it failed.”