The Caliphate Invasion Read online

  “Hey, one man’s trash and all that. So do we have a deal?”

  Rachel held her tongue as he and Rand shook hands. When the Warriors finally left, she squealed and hugged Dixon.

  “We’re rich!”

  Euphrates River, Al Raqqa, Syria

  “Are those what I think they are?”

  Kat stuck her rifle barrel through the camouflage netting over her head to get a better view. A brown banana peel clung tight to the flash suppressor as she nudged a trash bag to the side. The American/Iranian strike team had been drifting downstream in the rancid trash barge for hours, without the slightest whiff of fresh air. Kat didn’t smoke, but she couldn’t be more grateful for the cigarette butts shoved up her nostrils to dampen the stench.

  “God damn barbarians.” Even a hundred yards away, she had no trouble making out the severed heads lining the bridge over the Euphrates River. The skulls of at least twenty Turkish soldiers were balanced atop neatly arranged spits. The revived capital of the Islamic State’s “Caliphate” needed no other welcome sign.

  Captain Dore put a gentle hand on her armored back and pushed her flat on the deck. “Speaking of barbaric, it’s time. Stay down until they’re finished blowing this place back to the Stone Age.”

  For a few seconds, Kat savored the tranquility of the lapping waves and the barge’s puttering diesel engine. Even though she couldn’t see the B-52 bombers thirty thousand feet above her head, she couldn’t miss the blasts rocking the far edge of town and reenacting World War Two.

  Kat kept her head low as the distant krumps picked up speed and freight-trained closer. Doing her best to tune out the 2,000-pound bombs leveling a large chunk of Raqqa, she studied Captain Dore. He gazed back with genuine worry for her. Ever since losing half his team in one engagement, he’d been so, well, human. Dare she say, even caring?

  “Final approach. Prepare to disembark in…” Between the ka-booms in the not-so-far distance and the barge’s suddenly roaring diesels, the rest of the radio call was gibberish. Didn’t matter though.

  The ear-splitting screech as the oversized raft ran aground was clear enough. Kat grabbed the pole next to her and propped it up. The plywood sheet on the other end lifted a hole in the detritus-strewn camo netting about three feet high. She sprang out right behind Dore and dropped over the side of the boat into the target-rich Landing Zone. Twenty other Iranian and American troops charged out on her heels.

  “Bridge, 9 O’clock!” She took a knee in the wet sand and raised her rifle. Twenty meters to her left and five higher, an ISIS gunner on a captured Turkish Humvee spun his turret her way. He leveled his 12.7mm weapon much faster than she could raise her own.

  Not quicker than the overwatch team though. One of her Marine escorts materialized from a trash mound on the barge and swiveled his .50 caliber machine gun at the bridge. The half-inch slugs tore right through the Humvee’s thin armor and kept going out the other side, taking little pieces of the ISIS gunner’s balls with them.

  Dore whistled from the top of the boat ramp thirty yards ahead. “Kat, come on!”

  Kat chased after him, automatically sliding into her place in the staggered line of other soldiers storming Raqqa. At the top of the low ridge, two terrified young men, dressed all in black, stood in a foxhole lining the bridge road. AK-74’s lay at their feet and a black flag stenciled with Arabic graffiti rippled in the breeze above their raised hands. One yelled in English at Captain Dore with only the slightest accent.

  “We are both French citizens. Pursuant to section eight of the American military’s rules of engagement, you are only allowed to detain us for 24 hours before handing us over to the nearest French consulate and—”

  Captain Dore shot them both between the eyes, en passant. Kat giggled as she ran past him. “Is that really true?”

  “Yeah, I remember reading something about that.” He took a knee in the foxhole, circled a finger over his head and chatted in his radio. “Chalk One in position.”

  Kat nodded as Major Hussein with Chalk Two echoed agreement a hundred yards to her right. Dore flipped his thumb up. She nodded back and clicked on her radio. Time to get to the real work.

  “Fire mission: adjust fire, preplanned target Alpha.”

  She had a few seconds before the heavy mortar team, infiltrated overnight in the surrounding hills three kilometers away, could engage. Kat peered over the foxhole’s ledge and studied the smoke-filled dirt road downrange. A six-foot brick wall ringed the landing field, but that didn’t matter. The curvy, black alien dropship rose a good five stories above the wall. She ignored the sci-fi contraption and focused on the grounds around it.

  Specifically on a familiar turreted platform that appeared from nowhere and bobbed along the backside of the wall.

  The killer robot kicked out a chunk of the wall facing her team and created its own exit.

  “Captain, looks like the bastards have some help…”

  A dozen local insurgents crawled out of the hole first and filled the street. They each wore odd, form-fitting body armor over their torsos. Instead of AK-47’s, all raised black rectangles to their shoulders. Seemed like slimmed down versions of the fancy rail guns on the alien drones. The towering war machine came out last. The four-legged death dealer hovered behind the humans, jittering back and forth.

  “I can’t tell if it’s a loyal puppy or their leader.”

  Even from nearly two hundred yards away, Kat heard an intercom on the machine blare out something stern in Arabic.

  Thud. Kat zeroed her binoculars on a small explosion far past the enemy. It took the mortars long enough. How embarrassing to have to resort to expending rounds just to spot the main barrage. Like World War I or something. Kat took careful aim with her binoculars and measured the size of the blast to get the range. She then compared the range and direction to the target point on her map. In this post-GPS world, she had to relearn the old skills, and learn them fast.

  Kat spent all of two seconds estimating a new target, the enemy’s likely speed, direction of travel and the angle of deflection between her and the four 120 mm mortars waiting for her fire mission.

  “Drop 300, right 50. High Explosive followed by Willy Pete. Extreme danger close. Fire for effect!”

  Captain Dore and the rest of the chalk didn’t wait for the covering mortar barrage. They opened fire as yet another dozen insurgents joined the crowd. The terrorist gaggle shrugged off the American rounds striking their impenetrable body armor. With a collective chuckle rather than a war cry, they charged towards Kat’s team. The alien machine, gunfire sparking harmlessly off its sides, led the way.

  All four of its cannons swiveled towards the silent Special Operations Command operators. They could only grit their teeth and wait.

  “Shot out!”

  Kat missed the mortar team’s radio call as she threw herself flat a millisecond before the sandbags around her exploded. Something slammed her back hard enough to bruise her spine. She never even saw the damn muzzle flash from the drone.

  “Slow em’ down! Buy time for the mortars!” Captain Dore fired blindly over the parapet and yelled something. In her daze, Kat only snickered at the shard of shrapnel jutting out of his Kevlar helmet. She twisted around and shrugged off her shattered radio pack. The lithium battery inside was already smoking. Fumbling around the dust, she found her rifle. Kat tried to sit up, but her back screamed in protest. With gritted teeth, she hauled herself up anyway.

  Kat popped her head over the ledge, ready to judge her handiwork. Someone in the next foxhole over screeched, “Incoming!”

  Ka-ka-ka-krump. The four mortar shells landed as one… exactly 10 meters in front of the running insurgents. The enemy fighters weren’t complete amateurs. They had staggered their formation and spread out a little.

  Just not enough. The initial two volleys knocked every man off his feet, mostly because their legs weren’t there anymore. Their high-tech body armor ended at the waist. Her third mortar barrage landed with a fizzle
, rather than a bang, shrouding the shaking alien machine and withering bodies in a white cloud. Kat added her rifle fire to the hell storm and screamed.

  “Shake and bake, motherfuckers!”

  Torching off at 4,000 degrees, the “Willy Pete” white phosphorus rounds added the perfect crescendo to Kat’s percussion score.

  Captain Dore heaved himself out of what was the left of the foxhole and shouted into his radio at the Marines on the barge. “Gator team, keep up the base of fire! All chalks: bound forward and rally on—”

  Somehow the alien robot survived. It galloped out of the flaming haze and jabbed its scorpion tail at their floating gun platform. Kat emptied her magazine in impotence as a small sphere shot out of the tail. The ten US Marines still on the barge, busy hosing down ISIS reinforcements crossing the bridge to their rear, never knew what hit them.

  Kat dived back in her hole just as the world came apart. She choked in the sandstorm flooding the firing pit and beat her fist helplessly against a crate at the bottom of the pit. Dore slid in beside her, running a hand over her to check for injuries.

  “Wait a second…” she shrugged him off and popped the box open. “Oh, come to mama!” It only took her a second to prep the weapon. She flashed Dore a sadistic grin through the haze.

  “Captain, you might want one of these.”

  He yanked her down as she stood with the Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher poised on her shoulder. “Hold up, GI Jane. Use the team.” Dore readied a round himself, while organizing the rest of the chalk on his radio.

  “Jenkins, Myers, Alvarez—get your rockets up! Hit ‘em from the left while we hit him from the right. On my count. Five…”

  Kat inched up and steadied her aim. “Four…”

  The machine was barely thirty yards away. “Three…”

  One of the machine’s omniscient gun turrets swiveled her way. Kat ignored the count. She just cocked the hammer, flicked the safety off and squeezed the trigger as the turret opened fire.

  Her heart stopped as the incoming lead shredded her Rocket Propelled Grenade before it even had time to arm.

  “One!”

  Dore fired his anti-tank rocket simultaneously with the guys on the far side of the machine. His shot didn’t get much farther than hers. Instead of finishing Kat and Dore off though, the warbot pivoted and turned all its attention on the other three incoming missiles. In the blink of an eye, the drone ripped them apart.

  “Goddam—”

  Kat caught the briefest glimpse of one warhead corkscrewing through the shrapnel cloud, tail fins shot off. The round detonated against the base of the deadly tail in a burst of flame… but did nothing. The robot just kept trudging along.

  Faster and faster. The beast galloped headlong into the river without firing a shot. It head-butted a support pylon on the bridge and flailed about. For a brief moment, the monster seemed to pause and think about something.

  Then the crazy bastard disintegrated in another epic explosion, taking a truck full of ISIS fighters on the bridge with it to robot hell.

  Captain Dore waved his arm again as his scattered chalk popped out of their firing pits. “Whatcha all waiting for? Secure the west side of the Landing Zone. Bound forward!”

  Kat stayed with the four-man base of fire team while Dore and eight soldiers bounded forward. With her radio busted and a mere rifle in her hands, she felt naked and alone. The only other radio with range enough to reach the mortars was with Hussein’s unit, on the east side of the alien ship.

  Getting that radio was her new mission. After bounding forward when it was her team’s turn, she slid into a firing point along the smashed wall with the other shooters. Pausing only long enough to find Chalk Two on the far side of the Landing Zone, she hollered at Captain Dore.

  “I’ve got to link up with the second chalk and their radio or we’ll have no fire support! Cover me!”

  Without waiting for an acknowledgement, Kat dashed along the southern wall running between her team and the other chalk on the east wall. She leapt from one pile of rubble to the next, hoping the low mounds offered some cover from the ship.

  About halfway to the second chalk’s position, a hydraulic hiss filled the air. Kat dived behind a pile of loose bricks and fired blindly at the ramp opening on the rear of the spaceship. Her heavy fire managed to pin the enemy down for just a second. An alien fired back from the ship with one of those metal storm weapons the faceless enemy favored. She could feel the mound of bricks shrinking under her back as hundreds of incoming rounds pulverized them to dust.

  Just when the shells should have ripped through Kat’s little fort and shredded her, a half-dozen small explosions shut up the enemy gunners. Kat tactically reloaded and risked a peek over her shoulder.

  She wasn’t sure what shocked her more. That the two space-suited humanoid figures in their black exoskeletons could survive the hail of 40mm grenades from her covering team… or that they could shrug it off and yet still decide to retreat. Strange bastards.

  At least the opportunity wasn’t going to waste. All the Iranian troops in Chalk Two dashed from cover and sprinted across the open field in five seconds. As the last of the aliens fled inside and the ship’s ramp began to rise, Kat leapt out and raced after the Iranians.

  “Wait! Hussein, I need your long-range radio before you breach!”

  None of the soldiers paid her any attention. They were all so focused on chucking hand grenades into the darkness inside the ship. Just as Kat made it to the last man in the stack, the first two charged inside, firing away. In four seconds, Kat was left alone outside while the rest of the team disappeared up the ramp.

  “Ah, screw it.”

  With a grimace, she flicked off her safety and joined the raging firefight inside.

  She reached the top of the ramp with her rifle high and a rebel yell in her throat. Her combat entrance became less glamorous when she tripped over the body of the last Iranian she saw go up. Kat caught a brief glance of a mountain of bodies just as one of the buzz-sawing alien guns nicked her helmet. The Kevlar piece broke apart, but Kat was more worried about the slickness gushing down her face and neck. Her vision narrowed to a pinprick as her body grew instantly colder.

  Kat didn’t need to take her pulse to feel it blinking out. She reached for the grenades strapped to her chest, but no part of her body below the neck would respond.

  One of the exoskeletons trumped up. Kat’s last sight before the blood loss shut down her heart was of the suited alien creature hovering over her. It pointed at the ponytail spilling out the back of her head and jabbered at its partner.

  The son of a bitch pulled some injector device from a pouch as the ramp closed and plunged the hall into darkness.

  Part II

  “It is not well to drive men into final corners; at those moments they could all develop teeth and claws.”

  —Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage

  Day Eight

  Mecca

  West Saudi Arabia

  Kat opened her eyes reluctantly. The odds weren’t in her favor that she’d be waking up in heaven. Someone prodded her shoulder with a tender finger rather than a pitchfork.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Uh, fine.” Kat sat up on a mat. Not a mattress, but a simple rug on the floor. There were three other women in the windowless room. None of them were armed. Kat eyed the group with sullen recognition and solidarity. Kat mirrored the grim smile of the young Japanese woman crouching next to her.

  “Really good. Best I’ve felt in years, despite being a prisoner.” Kat ran a hand over the back of her head. A patch of hair was missing from where she’d been shot, but there was no wound. Not even a scar. She rocked to her feet and gaped down at her blood-encrusted uniform. Kat’s thirty-year old body bounced like it was eighteen again. Even the slight ache in her knees from years of overloaded parachute jumps was gone.

  “What in God’s name did they do to me?”

  The Asian woman opened her purse
and shined a pinhole flashlight in her eyes. Kat didn’t protest as the other woman took her blood pressure and checked her reflexes with a rubber hammer. The stranger puckered her lips.

  “Hmm. Absolutely perfect. Just like the others. Were you given an injection directly into the spinal column before they took you?”

  “I think so. I also took a couple of friggin’ bullets to the skull before that. I’m not complaining, but what the hell is going on? Are you a doctor?”

  The woman packed up her meager stock of medical equipment and sighed. “Almost. I was a medical student at Osaka University. At least until these Monsutās attacked. Their black ships came and scooped up hundreds of students. They dumped all the boys somewhere over the Pacific, but brought us girls here. I…”

  She choked up but recovered fast. “I’m Sakura, by the way.”

  “Kat, from America.” Kat changed the subject and waved at the other two young women. One tall blonde, wearing nothing but a bikini, huddled in the corner and mumbled to herself. The other, sporting a long dress and a hijab, lay curled on her rug. Both stared straight ahead, oblivious to Kat. “And who are these charismatic ladies?”

  “I don’t know. The blonde’s Russian and the other is Malaysian, I think. They haven’t spoken a word in any language since being taken into the mothership last night. From the stories I’ve heard about what happens when you’re ‘called to service,’ I can’t blame them.”

  “Whoa, go back. What mothership? Where are we?”

  Sakura opened the door to the cell. It wasn’t even locked. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. Come see for yourself.”

  Even Kat knew when it was time to shut up and follow. They left and meandered through an air-conditioned hallway. Kat passed dozens of small rooms, closets and offices really, full of terrified women before the hallway spilled them into a mammoth concourse. The biggest she’d ever seen. Endless rows of lavish columns, supporting gorgeous yet vaguely exotic arches, stretched for hundreds of meters in every direction.