The Caliphate Invasion Read online

  APOCALYPSE IN TIME:

  THE CALIPHATE INVASION

  A SCI-FI ACTION/ADVENTURE

  BOOK 1

  Copyright 2018 by Michael Beals

  Cover Art by:

  Michael Beals

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously.

  Table of Contents

  North Central Florida Map

  Middle East Map

  Part I

  Day One

  Al Mukalla

  Reformed Baptist Medical Center

  Gulf of Aden

  Ponte Vedra, Florida

  Royal Omani Air Force Base Thumrait

  West Palatka, Florida

  Somewhere Over the Eastern Saudi Arabian Desert

  Day Two

  Unknown County Road

  US Army Camp Arifjan

  FEMA Emergency Sustainment Center

  Iraqi Army Traffic Control Point, Hwy 1

  Day Three

  Interstate 75

  Day Four

  “Mother Gaia Homestead”

  Open Desert

  Day Five

  Paradise City

  Hillah, Iraq

  Northwestern Outskirts of Gainesville, Florida

  Walls of Babylon

  Homecoming

  Day Seven

  Camp “Resolute”

  Steinhatchee Wildlife Management Area

  Euphrates River, Al Raqqa, Syria

  Part II

  Day Eight

  Mecca

  Day Ten

  Suwannee River Trading Post

  Masjid al-Haram Mosque

  Day Twenty

  Al Jumum, Saudi Arabia

  Hwy 441 Border Control Point

  Outside of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

  Part III

  Day Twenty-Three

  Camp “Victory”

  Megiddo, Israel

  Plus ca change…

  Final Caliphate Tactical Operations Center

  Somewhere over the Mediterranean Sea

  Hwy 441 Border Control Point

  Part IV

  Day Thirty

  Fortress Saint-Maurice

  Southwest Switzerland

  Day Thirty-One

  Alachua County Courthouse

  Downtown Gainesville, Florida

  Day Thirty-Two

  Bouchs, Switzerland

  Suwannee River Trading Post

  Day Thirty-Three

  Battle of the Vatican

  Day Thirty-Four

  Lake City, Florida

  Part V

  Day Thirty-Five

  Northern Outskirts of Milan, Italy

  Lake Constance/Bodensee Switzerland

  Lake City Regional Airport

  Wilayat Napoli of the Final Caliphate (Formerly Naples, Italy)

  Osceola National Forest

  Day Thirty-Seven

  Wilayat al-Fizan (Formerly Benghazi, Libya)

  Sample: Kat’s Commandos Book I

  Prologue: London

  Acronyms/Slang/Terminology

  North Central Florida Map

  Middle East Map

  Note: National borders have been omitted since neither the invaders, ISIS nor the multi-national Resistance pay any attention to them.

  Part I

  “It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the great task remaining before us… that these dead shall not have died in vain and that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom…”

  —US President Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address

  Day One

  Al Mukalla

  Eastern Yemen

  02:00 local time, 1 June, 20soon

  “Two minutes to the Landing Zone. Pucker up everyone!”

  Sergeant First Class Katherine “Kat” Walker yawned and unsnapped her harness. She hadn’t budged since launching from the USS Gerald R Ford in the Arabian Sea at o’ dark thirty. The rest of the US Army Special Operations Command operators wedged on board the MV-22 Osprey helicopter stretched out around her.

  Kat jogged in place for ten seconds, her favorite pre-operation ritual to lubricate the mind and muscles. As a forward air controller attached to the Special Operations Team, she wasn’t a door-kicker. No matter how much admitting it hurt, she wouldn’t be on point for this raid. There were twelve high-speed shooters between Kat and the rear ramp waiting to fast-rope down and finish the dirty work.

  Which didn’t mean she had nothing to do in the meantime.

  Kat studied her tablet computer and its live drone feed, waiting for a reaction from their upcoming target. Staff Sergeant Roland, the team’s medic, peered over her shoulder and spit the last of his dip into a Dr. Pepper bottle.

  “What are you waiting for, Kat? Quit playing with yourself and just waste the Hajjis already.”

  “Ah, ah. Slow your roll, big fella.” Kat wagged a finger at him and stared deeper into the screen. “Whatever the job, be it business, sex or even hostage rescue missions like this, it all comes down to…” She leered at her handheld. “Timing. Now we’re ready.”

  On the black and white thermal screen in her hand, one of the bearded, AK-wielding locals at the target site jerked his head towards the sky. Waving frantically, he skipped to a nearby pickup truck and spun a quad-barreled anti-aircraft gun towards the thumping sounds. Fifteen more bad guys materialized out of thin air. They scattered around the compound’s courtyard and raised machine guns and rocket propelled grenade launchers at the heavens. One even sighted a heat-seeking, surface-to-air missile at the sky. An expensive, American-made one.

  Roland squinted. “Shit. Check out the heavy metal. Looks like one hell of an ambush.”

  “Oh, it is, but not the way you’re thinking.” Roland cocked his head as Kat purred at her screen.

  “Yeah baby, that’s right. Put all your cards on the table.”

  Kat kept grinning as more heavily armed Al Qaeda members crept out of hidey-holes and geared up to greet her raiding party. She spent a few moments manually assigning targets using the screen’s digital overlay. Thirty seconds out from the Landing Zone, she clicked her inter-squad throat mike off and switched to the bulky radio on her back.

  “Dragon element, this is Butterfly 7. Target’s warmed up. I just sent you a revised fire plan. Ring the doorbell, please.”

  In response, muzzle flashes blossomed in the darkness outside her transport chopper’s windows. Kat hummed as a tsunami of 30mm rounds sanitized the Landing Zone and clouded up her drone feed. The escorting Apache gunships would continue pumping out high-explosive shells until she waved them off.

  “Dragon element: All clear. Shift fire to the outer perimeter. We’re coming in hot and—”

  A screech ripped through her radio at the same time the cargo bay’s red interior lights flickered in and out. The Osprey tilted a good thirty degrees forward and knocked the Special Forces troops on their asses. A second later, or a few years to Kat’s stopped heart, the bird recovered with a shudder and returned to level flight. The strange radio squelch faded as fast as it came. The pilot’s cool voice over the intercom didn’t betray a hint of concern.

  “Relax everyone. Just a power surge. Maybe static lightning. Radar and GPS are out, but all other systems are running. No big deal; we’re continuing the mission.”

  Kat climbed up and helped Roland to his feet. He jabbed a finger at the nearest viewport, but there wasn’t a single light for miles.

  “A blackout, huh? I’m telling you, the enemy knew we were coming.”

  She peered out the window at the suddenly dark coastal town of Al Mukalla. “Don’t be so paranoid. It’s a Third World country
. Not exactly a reliable electrical grid. The power is always going down…”

  Kat’s tablet blinked an odd error message. She’d somehow lost her satellite connection to the orbiting Reaper drone. What the hell?

  “Rope out!”

  Kat tucked the device away as the Osprey swooped in on the target and hovered in place. Shoveling away her confusion, she cleared her mind and focused on the task at hand.

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  She cracked and shook an infrared chemlight strapped to her helmet, marking herself as friendly to anyone viewing her through night vision or thermal sights. Speaking of which, Kat flipped her own Night Optical Observation Device eyepiece, mounted on her helmet, up and out of the way. Depth perception would be rather useful on the way down.

  Letting her muscle memory take over, Kat shuffled towards the rear ramp with the rest of her disappearing team. The loadmaster shoved a fat rope in her gloved hands and slapped her shoulder. Clutching tight, she wrapped her thighs around her swaying lover and slid into the windswept dust storm below.

  By the time she landed on the target building fifty feet later, most of the operators had slipped inside. The nitty gritty of clearing the farmhouse and saving the hostages wasn’t her problem. Ignoring the sporadic shooting echoing from the stairwell, Kat took up her assigned overwatch position on a corner of the rooftop and dropped her Night Optical Observation Device eyepiece over her shooting eye. She scanned the gruesome slaughter in the courtyard and farm fields below with pupils unfocused. Kat used her peripheral vision to pick up movement, rather than study every individual object for threats.

  As if summoned, some young man crawled out of a burning outlying structure a hundred yards away. Flames danced along his legs and hopped towards his face, but he screamed in defiance. Barely able to sit up straight, the teenager hefted a Rocket Propelled Grenade tube to his shoulder somehow. With the way he jerked about, it would take a miracle for him to hit the hovering Ospreys. Privately, Kat admired his tenacity and courage.

  Professionally though, she whipped up her rifle and put two rounds in his face without a second thought. She took one last look around for threats before hollering at the few other guys on the roof.

  “Northwest courtyard clear.”

  Chores done, Kat dug out her tablet and went back to her primary job: covering the extraction. The device powered on, but refused to make a satellite connection to any surveillance asset. As a matter of fact, she couldn’t connect to any station on the military’s futuristic, multi-billion dollar “battle net.” Kat clucked her tongue and reset the computer. No change.

  “Well, doesn’t that complicate things?”

  The steady voice of the lead Apache pilot chimed over her radio and cut through the fog of war. “Butterfly, this is Dragon. We’re covering the access road for you. I have eyes on at least fifty likely hostiles and a dozen non-standard tactical vehicles staging two kilometers west of the objective. Looks like they’re waiting on something. We’ll engage as soon as they exit the town, over.”

  The trooper next to her, a loaner Marine from Marine Corps Special Operations Command, popped an overlooked enemy sentry on a hilltop four hundred meters away. He collected the hot brass from his shell and stashed it in a thigh pocket. Kat didn’t raise an eyebrow. Some folks kept far worse trophies.

  The Leatherneck spit over the roof’s ledge. “What the hell are the birds waiting on? Smoke the bastards while they’re grab-assing in one place. Why do we have to make everything so complicated? If they got a weapon, then they’re fair game.”

  Kat shrugged without taking her eyes off the courtyard. “I don’t make the rules of engagement, Jake.” She didn’t like sitting around waiting for trouble any more than he did, but Central Command kept them on a short leash to avoid “diplomatic entanglements.” Yemen’s civil war had more sides than a bi-polar, schizophrenic serial killer. Not to mention the minor detail that the US was officially neutral.

  “There’s a chance these people are just tribal rebels and don’t have a beef with us. Sure, the fighters might be Al Qaeda, ISIS or some other Islamist group, but what if they’re simply the local town militia? Just regular guys trying to protect their families and thinking they’re the ones under attack by terrorists. Point is, we don’t engage unless—”

  Over the whumping helicopters, no one heard the incoming mortars in time to shout a warning. Kat threw herself flat as a pair of explosions lifted the night’s skirt in front of her. A chunk of shrapnel plowed through the sand brick parapet and clanked off her helmet.

  Jake spit out a mouthful of dust and flashed her a grin. “You were saying?”

  Kat flipped him the bird just as Captain Dore, the strike team’s leader, came rushing back upstairs and whooped.

  “All clear inside; ready to extract. Kat! Where’s this shit coming from?”

  Kat swallowed the “How the hell should I know?” in her throat. That’s what artillery-finding radars were for. The mortars could be firing from miles away in any direction. Instead of cussing, she just whispered in her radio.

  “Any Dragon element, do you have eyes on those mortars?”

  A second salvo rained lead around her. This one even closer than the last.

  “Negative, Butterfly. I’m not seeing anything.”

  Yet another barrage narrowly missed clobbering the two Osprey’s racing in tight circles above.

  “Kat, we need to find these SOB’s or we’re sitting ducks up—” Captain Dore dived back inside the stairwell as an explosive shower clipped the building.

  “Oh, for Christ's sake!” Kat leapt to her feet and peeked at the courtyard two stories below. Sure enough, a small mortar crater beckoned. She waved at Jake lying prone a few feet away.

  “Cover me!”

  Without another word, she tucked and rolled over the ledge.

  “Smooth move, genius.” Kat wheezed as she clambered up from the sand and shook off the rattling in her bones. With luck, none of the guys above could see her pained grimace in the dark. They’d probably tease her forever either way.

  She jogged over to the nearest crater, took a knee and studied the distinctive Pac-Man footprint of high-angle mortar fire. Laying her rifle flat across the tiny crater, she held the muzzle in place where the debris tail flared out on one side of the hole. She then lined up the top of her buttstock at the same point on the opposite end of the crater.

  With her crude straight edge marking the rear corners of the crater in place, Kat ran back a few steps and yanked out her GPS unit.

  “You gotta be shitting me!” The device turned on, but couldn’t locate a single satellite.

  She’d never seen that before. There should have been a minimum of three, usually six, GPS satellites within range at any given time. There were even spare satellites in each orbit, just in case one went offline. According to her tracker though, there wasn’t a damn thing up there.

  Another mortar geysered twenty meters to her right and slammed Kat face-first into the sand. Something sharp jutted out of her side SAPI plate. She paused just long enough to make sure the shrapnel hadn’t penetrated her body armor, not bothering to pull the scorching piece of metal out.

  “I guess we’re doing things the old-fashioned way then.”

  Still snuggling the ground, Kat tugged out her ancient compass and sighted it along the middle of her rifle a yard away. She measured the center azimuth towards the crater’s “skirt tail” three times to be sure of the direction before clicking her radio mike.

  “Dragon, this is Butterfly. Counterbattery fire mission. Fall in on my location.” It only took a second for one of the orbiting Apache gunships to scoot over and orient itself directly above her shoulder.

  “We’re looking for two mortars firing along 5500 mils (309°) from my position…” She picked up the still-steaming tail fin from one shell fragment. “Looks like 60mm. So, maximum range of 3,500 meters. Happy hunting!”

  Kat grabbed her weapon and sprinted back to the building as the
sky hunter sped off on the axis she gave. With their high-tech 128x Forward-looking infrared surveillance systems, the attack helicopters could find a literal needle in a haystack from a mile away. They just needed someone to show the way to the barn. The Apache’s chain gun burped away before she even made it to the front door.

  “One friendly coming in!”

  She cocked her knee back and started to kick in the…

  “STOP!”

  Kat froze, balancing on one foot. The rickety door swung open after a moment. Some Special Forces soldier reached out and dragged her inside. He pointed down to a frag grenade nestled inside a glass jar full of ball bearings. The homemade Claymore contraption was bolted to the doorframe just about at waist height. A snipped string dangled from the grenade’s detonator pin and the other half hung from the door handle. The trooper waved his multi-tool and clucked his tongue. Kat took a ragged breath.

  “Sneaky bastards. Thanks Mikey.” She faked a smile, trying to distract him from her shaking hands. “That would have blown my balls off!”

  Sergeant Michaels clapped her back. “Doubt it. Whatever you got down there, it’s made of steel!”

  Kat couldn’t help but chuckle as she crept deeper inside the blackened hallway. Her foot squished into something slick. Someone puked in the darkness. Kat followed the sound and shined her barrel-mounted Maglite on the crowd of civilians huddled in the next room. Wiping her boot against the dead insurgent’s shirt at her feet to get his loose brain matter off, she cocked her head at Michaels.