The Caliphate Invasion Page 13

  He shoved Rachel to the ground and hissed. “Twenty feet back, behind the V-shaped oak tree. The rifle’s in a bag underneath a palm frond. Low-crawl over there and don’t move a muscle until you see my signal. We might be able to bullshit our way out of this. Go!”

  Rachel had just slithered into the bush when a green National Guard Humvee raced out of the “well-hidden” access road to their camp. A trio of red, white and blue pickup trucks followed close on the Humvee’s bumper. Dixon’s confidence collapsed when the convoy pulled up to his shack. Ten men, all packing M4’s with fancy optics and sporting a mishmash of tactical gear, dismounted without a care in the world. Dixon’s breath faded when he looked closer at their uniforms.

  Each “soldier” had a clean, navy-blue Department of Homeland Security t-shirt peeking out from underneath his body armor.

  Their leader strolled over to the commune’s council, whistling the whole way. He shoved the unarmed and zip-tied guard Rand had posted on the access road ahead of him. “This is definitely the most interesting group I’ve seen all day. Appears the rumors were true. Who’s in charge here?”

  Dixon gulped and stepped forward, but Rand rested a steady hand on his shoulder. She gave him a quick whisper as she glided past. “Thanks, macho man, but it’s my responsibility.”

  “You looking for me? I’m sorry, but we don’t have space for more refugees. You’ll have to keep going.”

  The DHS boss slapped his knee laughing. “Clean, sexy and funny! Rare combination these days. If I wasn’t on such a tight schedule… well, let’s stick to business.” He raised his voice, but still kept a lingering eye on Rand’s chest.

  “The Federal Government has been reestablished. Welcome back to civilization. Your community is now under federal protection. Our civil affairs team will be along in the next few days to help restore power and distribute emergency supplies…”

  The newcomer crinkled his brow when no one cheered. He stumbled in his speech and seemed to skip ahead. “To help pay for the reconstruction effort and to aid the fight against insurrectionists, Governor Heinrich is collecting a small, temporary flat tax from every neighborhood in our jurisdiction.”

  Rand snorted. “Sure thing. You can take all the money you please.”

  He grinned and flicked his eyes over the ripening crops around him. “Oh, we’re much more practical. We’re taxing 25% of your food, fuel, weapons and ammo stores, as well as any other necessary emergency materials we discover.”

  Dixon unconsciously slipped a few paces away, but Rand stepped forward. “So you think we’re a bunch of serfs that are going to pay tribute? You should have brought more men.” Rand set her jaw and flashed a thumbs-up at some imaginary army.

  The DHS official chuckled and raised his left arm. His troops fanned out and snapped their weapons up. “Cute. I think you’re a smart ass bitch with more luck than you deserve. If you had a real fighting force, we never would have made it this far.”

  He mellowed as soon as he called Rand’s bluff. “But let’s not get off on the wrong foot. We’re the good guys. What if the End Timer’s had found you first? They don’t bother with taxes. Every community they conquer is given the choice between annexation or destruction. I’m giving you and your people the chance to join the winning side for cheap.”

  “Sir! Check this out!”

  The DHS detachment leader reluctantly pulled away from Rand’s face and trumped over to Dixon’s campfire. He chuckled and wagged his finger.

  “Oh, this isn’t good. Appears we were too late. You’ve already been corrupted. Have you folks been making bombs for those religious terrorists? There’s a much heftier penalty for supporting rebellion, I’m afraid. Starts with the confiscation of all war supplies…”

  Four of his soldiers began scooping up Dixon’s painstakingly assembled materials. The raider came back and snatched Rand by the wrist as she whipped her hand up to slap him. “And ends with detaining 10% of the womenfolk to ensure good behavior in the future.”

  Dixon dropped both his hands and pumped them towards the ground. Rachel must have understood the signal to stay put, because she immediately ignored him. His mind didn’t even register her shot before a liter-sized jar of nitric acid on the table erupted in a red flash. The nearest mercenary stumbled backwards from the corrosive droplets splattering his face and dropped his bucket of urea nitrate crystals.

  Right into the campfire.

  Dixon’s instincts ordered his legs to run and escape with Rachel in the confusion, but his mind refused to listen. He let the adrenaline take over and wash away all rational thought as he dashed through the cloud of noxious, white fumes. One of the screaming, flaming FEMA men fell to his knees in front of the lead Humvee in the convoy. Dixon never broke stride as he launched himself off the dying husk’s back and landed on the truck’s hood. The young, wide-eyed machine gunner in the gun turret must have been a conscript. He was surely no professional. Dixon caved his face in with his steel-toed boot, ensuring he’d never have the chance to learn.

  Dixon slid into the vacant turret and gripped the M240 medium machine gun. Back in his Army days, the infantry never let him play much with their big guns. His platoon sergeant used to say it was bad luck having the medic behind a gun. Too much of a conflict of interest. Dixon spun the turret and held the trigger down, doing his best to live up to the hype.

  Four of the five enemy survivors tossed their weapons and threw up their hands, but the fifth took a knee and opened fire at Dixon. That was enough to seal everyone’s fate. Dixon wasted them all with ten-round bursts… and without a pang of guilt. When his belt ran dry and the bolt clicked empty, he popped his head out from behind the gun shield. Dixon beat his chest and howled.

  “Tax this, motherfuckers!”

  Dixon was still venting when the armored driver’s door creaked open. He snagged a rifle to engage, but the weapon strap hooked on a corner of the compact turret. The surviving mercenary laughed as he cooked off a frag grenade and chucked it inside the Humvee.

  He and Dixon locked eyes at the last moment, just as the mercenary’s right eye disintegrated. Dixon gaped as his grenade bounced off the back passenger window and exploded harmlessly in the open.

  Dixon jumped out of the Humvee in a daze and scanned for more targets, but the only surprise came from a girl tackling him from behind and hugging him close.

  “Rachel, damn baby! Two amazing snap shots. You were right. You are one hell of a better shot than me! I’m so sorry you had to kill him, but it was either him or me. I’m proud that you didn’t hesitate.”

  “What? That wasn’t me. I only fired once, at the acid. I was too disgusted to shoot again. Rand was the only other person with a gun…”

  He followed her gaze past the charred, vaguely human bodies around his lab. Rand stepped through the smoke and shuffled towards them. He glanced away from the DHS leader and his nose-less corpse behind her. Dixon politely ignored the blood dripping out of her mouth as Rand slid up to him. He grinned and focused on checking the rounds count of his new rifle.

  “Maybe there’s something to this Gaia business of yours. We ask for some weapons and she drops them right in our lap.”

  Rand held her blood-splattered rifle out at arm’s reach, as if it would bite at any moment, while she stroked the hot steel. Rand flipped a fiery eye over the bodies scattered around them. Her gaze settled on the pristine camp in the distance. The sobbing of terrified children carried all the way to their battleground. She hung her head and looped the weapon strap over her shoulder.

  Dixon rested a hand on her pumping shoulders, but Rand’s sobbing shut off as fast as it came. Her hiss held all the fury of a thousand generations of scorned women.

  “Get some more weapons. No matter what you have to loot. Build us an army.”

  Hillah, Iraq

  60 miles south of Baghdad

  “Kat, I thought we were avoiding the main highways? We’ll never get through this traffic jam.”

  Kat kicked
Michaels in the helmet. Easy to do, since she stood on her seat and leaned out the Bradley’s turret hatch. “Will you stay still for a second? Quit spinning the damn turret in every direction!”

  Down in the gunner’s seat, Michaels only grunted, but at least took his death grip off the traverse lever. He shifted to tapping the gun tower left and right along a smaller envelope. Kat let it go. She wasn’t likely to fall out. Not with the entire convoy standing still. They might have taken the lazy, scenic route to Baghdad; taking their time to avoid all major roads and often crossing open desert, but they’d always been on the move. Now, less than two hours from their goal, her armored caravan hit a traffic jam that would terrify even a regular Los Angeles commuter.

  “Well, do you see a way through this clusterfuck from up there?” Middle Eastern drivers traditionally had a laissez faire attitude towards traffic laws, but toss in fear and suddenly road signs and even roadways became nothing more than polite suggestions. The locals responded to traffic slowdowns by reflexively passing in any direction that was open, signs and other drivers be damned. Once all lanes were filled up, the median and shoulders were fair game. After they packed every inch of asphalt with cursing drivers heading in the same direction, the locals took their overloaded vehicles off road without the slightest hesitation, but with predictable results.

  “Oh, I’m not concerned with the traffic. I want to know why everyone’s heading south, out of town, at the same flippin’ time we’re trying to get in there.”

  She clutched her binoculars tight to reduce blurriness and scanned the horizon. “I don’t see any smoke downtown nor any of those flying enemy craft. Why are these people scared so shitless?”

  Kat had tried questioning several passing motorists, but couldn’t find an English speaker in the panicked flock. The best she came up with was someone pantomiming a machine gun and then a bomb detonating. Not exactly shocking news in this part of the world.

  After the convoy spent five minutes to crawl fifty yards forward, Captain Dore’s voice crackled in her radio. “Net call: Enough of this shit. Let’s bite the bullet and get off here. We’ll cut through the city center in a single file. I’ll take the lead. Stay close and stay alert, because we’re going to fly through there. Not stopping for anything until we hit the big highway north of town. Hooah?”

  Kat added her acknowledgment to the muttered chorus from the other vehicles. She dropped down as her driver jerked the engine forward. Peeking into the infantry bay behind her, she put on a cheery face and briefed the civilians, crammed in there hip to hip, on the new plan. Kat had to admit they were a pretty tough lot. She would have been going stir-crazy squirreled away down there without ever knowing what was going on outside, yet they’d barely uttered a word in days. Even the kids. Was that a good sign?

  By the time she popped her head back out of the turret, the team had covered two kilometers. Her Bradley was the fifth armored ducky following behind Dore’s mother vehicle. With only ten-meter spacing she couldn’t see much as they barreled down the tight, desolate streets at max speed. Apparently, her driver was just as blind.

  “Johnson, watch out for…” Kat grimaced as the Bradley’s treads chewed up the curb and crushed several empty street vendor carts, but she held her tongue. Her driver’s little boo boos were nothing compared to the trail of destruction the lead vehicles left in their wake. Fighting the urge to micromanage, she climbed as high as possible to scan ahead. It wasn’t particularly productive, since she couldn’t see around the dust cloud, but Kat savored the illusion of control.

  That sense of power evaporated the moment her convoy exited the city center. Four private guards manned the first barricade on the outskirts of town. They stumbled over themselves in their rush to open the barrier and let the Americans through. In her decade in uniform, Kat had never seen such gusto from local security forces. Michaels stuck his head out of the gunner’s hatch and waved back at the armed civilians pumping their fists in the air. Kat just gripped the roof-mounted machine gun close.

  “So they’re happy to see us… why does that pucker my asshole?”

  As they approached the onramp for the only major highway cutting through the city, Dore’s lead vehicle slowed down. “Wedge formation everyone. Fan out. That street is far too empty.”

  Which was true until they approached. While most of the cars and buses were shredded wrecks, the grumbling American Infantry Fighting Vehicle’s kicked up a hornet’s nest of activity. Out of the post-apocalyptic hellscape ahead, hundreds of civilians emerged from cover as one storm. The horde lurched towards the American vehicles as fast as they could. Since the majority were women carrying little children, that wasn’t particularly fast. The only adult males in the group sported greying beards and moved the slowest of all.

  Dore’s lead track sped up again. His voice over the platoon net was flatter than a month-opened soda. “Just Charlie Mike. Keep going. We can’t take them with—”

  An Iraqi police truck exploded three hundred yards behind the fleeing refugees. After passing so many abandoned local security positions in the last few days, Kat naturally assumed the cop cars blocking the road were simply left wherever they rolled to a stop.

  Having witnessed so much cowardice, it took her a moment to realize the ten Iraqi officers crouching behind their vehicles were, lo and behold, actually doing their jobs and standing their ground. Hell, they even fired at the enemy with halfway decent accuracy.

  Michaels whooped and spun the turret just a tad. “I got a bead on ‘em. Are we clear to engage?”

  “What? No! Not them. Find whatever the police are shooting at!”

  “No shit. Do you think I’m crazy?”

  Kat didn’t answer. Michaels just giggled. “I got the bastards. 11 O’clock, 600 meters past the cops.”

  She zoomed in on her firing display and found three dusty pickup trucks perched on a slight hilltop. She couldn’t make out many details, but those oversized black flags with the misshapen circle in the middle were clear enough.

  “What the hell is ISIS doing operating this far south?”

  Heavy machine guns mounted on the back of two of the non-standard tactical vehicles blazed away at the highway. The third aimed its massive anti-aircraft weapon like a machine gun and raked the police barrier.

  Dore’s voice howled over her radio. “All elements: contact. You know what to do.”

  The eight Bradley’s burped their 25mm Bushmaster chain guns as one volley. Despite a range of over half-mile, not a single American shell missed. They tore the three trucks into tiny chunks and disintegrated the dismounted terrorists nearby. Through it all, that ugly ass flag somehow survived. It fluttered even harder after the smoke settled.

  “All elements: fall in on the police line. We need some information. Keep a tight perimeter, but dismount and see what you can do for the wounded.”

  Kat bounded from her vehicle before it even clanked to a halt. Someone shoved a screaming baby in her face the second her boots touched the ground. “Take! Please, mister. Take to safety!”

  “Medic!” Kat didn’t touch the baby, but she pulled out a dressing for the swaying mother. There were traces of white edging her hijab. It hadn’t always been blood red.

  Ten yards away, Roland never looked up from the artery he was clamping shut on a squirming policeman. He mumbled something, but with an IV bag attached to another limp woman dangling between his teeth, Kat didn’t understand. She forced the bleeding woman in front of her to press down on the bandage and nudged her towards the line forming up behind Roland.

  Kat ran to Captain Dore and chomped down her frustration. Instead of screaming, “What the hell are we doing?” she settled on a more diplomatic, “What’s the plan, sir?”

  Dore stuck up a finger at her as he huddled together with the surviving and exhausted local police members. He whipped his map back and forth like a baton. A Yemeni-American journalist, one of the freed hostages they’d been lugging around, hovered at his elbow and tried to
keep up with translating six different conversations at once. Dore’s famous stoicism slipped just a little.

  “You people aren’t making any sense! Please, one at a time. Now, who’s in charge here?”

  Kat rolled her eyes and muttered under breath. “Sir, let’s stop screwing around and—” She jumped as someone on a stretcher tugged at her leg. The Iraqi policeman’s accentless English commanded her respect, despite the bone sticking out of his leg.

  “Please help me up, Sergeant.” He tightened down a bandage around the white shard jutting out of the hamburger of his knee. The crude dressing held the bone in place and stemmed the blood flow. Well, most of it, at least.

  She helped him to his shaking feet while supporting his weak side. The stranger barked something in Arabic. The other cops saluted and took off. Dore stopped gesticulating and turned around. “Where are they going?”

  With one good leg, the cop somehow took the lead and hobbled towards Dore’s Bradley. Kat did her best to keep up and guide him away, but she was unable to change his course. He plopped down on the back ramp with a sigh of relief.

  “I sent them to collect the weapons from the Jihadis you killed. We’ll need every gun we can get. Now, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Captain. To answer your question, I guess I’m in charge. When are the rest of your reinforcements arriving here?”

  Kat chuckled without mirth. “You ‘guess’ you’re in charge? Don’t you people even have a chain of command?”

  The local cop leaned against the Bradley’s rear fuel tank and took shallow breaths. He gave Kat a wink.

  “Now, now. I’ve been to New York. Whether you’re in America or Iraq, it’s rude to answer a question with a question. Yes, we have a chain of command. The police chief and most of our senior staff were killed in a suicide car bombing at headquarters this morning. Since then, the only officer I’ve met that outranked me was trying to flee. I shot him in the back. So, I’m in charge of whatever personnel are still alive and willing to fight. Speaking of which, please tell me this small unit isn’t all you’ve brought to the battle?”