Vengeance (11 page)

“They’re not just hitting it,” Wall said, as the explosions continued. “They’re annihilating it.”

“As long as they focus on the town, we’ll be okay,” Price said.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Barnard said.

She had barely finished speaking when a much closer wave of explosions rolled up through the forest.

“Everybody get down,” Price yelled. “Find what cover you can. Get The Tsar off the truck.”

Monster and Barnard lifted The Tsar and placed him on the ground next to the truck, taking advantage of what little protection it offered. Price found a depression in the ground and pressed herself into it.

More blasts. Flame and smoke rippled through the forest, closer and closer.

The ground was moving like an earthquake now, rolling shudders making it difficult to breathe. Barnard spread herself over The Tsar, protecting him from the debris that began to shower down on them. Earth, rock fragments, tree shards. The heat and pressure waves smashed through the forest, bending back tall gums and stripping them of their leaves. The little truck was shunted sideways by one blast, rolling onto its side and slamming into a tree where it wedged tight.

For a few moments the barrage seemed to stop, but it was only a respite, the eye of the storm. Through a gap in the trees, waving like reeds in the wind, Price saw the menacing, bug-like shape of a Bzadian Dragon, rocket ports alive with fire. It was a creature from hell, and it brought hell with it. In an awesome display of firepower the Dragon began to take the forest apart. Whole trees, on fire, were flying through the air.

“We gotta get out of here,” Wall shouted over the noise of the explosions. “It’s getting closer!”

“No!” Price yelled back. “Stay down. Stand up and you’ll die!”

As if to make her point, a tree trunk came crashing through the forest, smashing into the ground and rolling over and over, ending up on top of Price’s dip in the ground. A heavy branch, smoking but not burning, embedded itself in the dirt between her legs.

“Listen to your LT,” Brogan yelled. “There’ll be rotorcraft and rotorbots hovering overhead, just waiting for us to break cover. We have to ride it out.”

A tree at the edge of their clearing suffered a direct hit, about midway up. It shattered into thousands of splinters and shards, raining down all around them, clattering off their combat armour, but not penetrating.

There was screaming on the com – pain, fear, Price could not tell – and still the earth heaved and trees danced their awful dance, the fists of smoke and jagged teeth of red and yellow flames punched and chewed their way through the forest.

Price could hear more screaming, some of it hers, although it was submerged by wave after wave of crashing thunder and bone-shaking rumbles.

And then it was over.

Just as quickly as it started, it stopped. The only sounds were the diminishing whine of the jets overhead, the fading echoes of the explosions, and the intense and painful ringing in Price’s ears.

“Azoh,” Monster said.

“Is anybody hurt?” Price asked. “Is everyone okay?”

One by one the voices of her team checked in, slowly, dazed, as if stunned to find themselves still alive and uninjured.

“We need to get the heck out of here,” Wall said.

“We’re not going anywhere until Brogan operates on The Tsar,” Price said.

“I don’t know if we have time,” Brogan said. “Look.”

Price looked back to the east through the blackened, broken and upturned trees of what had been a thriving forest. The sky was glowing like a second sunrise, orange and red boiling into the sky. The world was ablaze.

“It’ll spread, and quickly,” Barnard said. “It hasn’t rained in this region since November. This place is a tinderbox.”

“Do what you need to do, Brogan,” Price said. “But do it quickly.”

[1030 HOURS LOCAL TIME]

[USS
APPLE
,
HAURAKI GULF, AUCKLAND]

Flight Commander Molly Shaw was glad to be back in the action. The USS
Apple
had been sheltering in its home base at Naval Base San Diego since the sinking of the USS
Galaxy
and her entire strike group early in the war. Human ships were just too vulnerable to the incredible firepower of the alien warplanes.

But not any more.

Scream jets had changed all that. The nickname came from their scram-jet engines, which were faster than the ram-jets of Bzadian aircraft, much faster. Able to outrun any Bzadian missile, they were about to change the face of the war.

They had their drawbacks though. Launching them was a long complicated procedure. They had to be attached to a carrier jet, which would then take off and climb almost to the stratosphere before releasing the jet. That took time.

Landing was impossible. The scream jets could not fly slowly enough to land. Instead they ditched. They cut engines and went vertical, letting gravity suck away all their speed. When they reached the apex of the climb they began to fall, parachutes were deployed and they ditched in the ocean as close to the carrier as possible. Recovery helicopters were needed to pick them up and bring them back to the ship for redeployment.

Shaw was glad to be on the sharp end of the knife. Bringing the fight to the Bzadians with a direct attack on their soil. Showing the aliens that humans could now strike where and when they pleased. The scream jets had already had their first encounter with Bzadian jets, and it had proved decisive.

The one thing she wished they had was an AEW plane: Airborne Early Warning. All of those had been lost in the early years of the war and the priority had been on producing new warplanes, not surveillance planes. There was little point in having an AEW plane aloft, because you knew it was going to be the first plane targeted by the Bzadians.

In any case, the USS
Apple
had twelve fighters permanently aloft, flying in concentric circles, actively looking for any intruders. They had permanent links to radar stations all along the western coastline of New Zealand. The defensive ring of ships that surrounded the USS
Apple
was on high alert and would remain so.

Shaw would be happy once she was in the air and on her way to her target: Canberra, Australia. The Bzadians were about to learn a lesson they would not easily forget.

The smoke from the explosions had been orange and grey. The smoke that was starting to eddy around them now was black. Smoke from the forest, which was well ablaze.

Wall, obeying Brogan’s instructions, jury-rigged some wiring from the truck. Brogan borrowed a surgical marking pen from Monster’s medikit and, after examining the wound carefully with the scope, made a series of careful markings on the bandages and the skin of The Tsar’s neck.

She wound a tight coil of wire around the protruding end of the needle and inspected it. She connected another wire to a metal pad. She stripped off The Tsar’s armour and taped the pad to his thigh.

“What’s that for?” Price asked.

“Grounding pad,” Brogan said, but didn’t explain further. Price didn’t like what she saw. The bandages were bloody.

Brogan stopped moving, listening. “Everybody freeze!”

Price heard it almost immediately. The quiet
whop-whop-whop
of small rotorblades. It faded in and out, just at the limit of her hearing. Rotorbots were quiet, so it was somewhere close by. Having uncapped hell, the Bzadians were coming back to survey the results of their work.

A gust of air from the east brought a plume of dense smoke, and with it a fist of hot air. Branches trembled. Leaves shook. Smoke eddied around them, filtering through the trees, shimmering in pencil thin rays of sunlight.

“We gotta get out of here,” Wall said. “Or we’re going to be crispy fried critters.”

“Not while that rotorbot is sniffing around us,” Price said.

“Not until Tsar is fixed,” Monster said.

The sound of rotorblades grew louder. It was much closer now. Price rested a hand on her sidearm as she thought through her options. There were none. They couldn’t risk the operation while the rotorbot was there, but it was clear that the fire was spreading and heading in their direction.

It was a race against time, and any way she thought it through, it was a race they would lose.

If the rotorbot found them, it was all over anyway; they wouldn’t be so lucky twice.
Lucky
. Price smiled bitterly to herself as she watched The Tsar’s chest fluttering in light, shallow breaths.

The rotorbot moved past them, a flickering shadow in the thickening smoke through the trees. An insect with a deadly sting in its tail. It must have been barely a few metres away and Price was very aware that any second it could decide to turn in their direction. They waited. Gradually, the sound receded.

But as it did, the smoke intensified. Any thicker and Brogan wouldn’t be able to see enough to operate.

“Do it,” Price whispered. “Forget the rotorbot. Do it now, as quietly as you can.”

Brogan nodded. “Connect the battery when I say,” she said. Then, after a longer examination of the needle, she said, “Okay, now.”

The coil of wire began to glow red. Price could not tear her eyes off it. Brogan also watched it intently, only looking away after the needle had reached a dull orange glow, warming to red. Then she turned to the mediscope, completely focused on the small screen as she clamped the end of the needle with a utility tool.

The flesh of The Tsar’s neck began to smoke and there came the terrible smell of burning flesh.

“Okay, shut it off,” Brogan said, and Wall disconnected the battery.

Slowly, gently, Brogan eased the needle out of The Tsar’s neck, watching every millimetre minutely on the mediscope. At one point she pressed the needle back into his neck before withdrawing it again.

When the needle was fully out, she dropped it onto the ground as if it was a foul, evil thing.

There was silence.

“Well?” Price asked.

“I think I got it,” Brogan said. She examined the wound, then applied some antiseptic cream and started to bandage The Tsar’s neck.

“How will we know?” Barnard asked. The intellectual ice queen of the team was pale and seemed shaken.

“If he lives,” Brogan said. “Then we’ll know. Get some plasma into him.”

“Last bag,” Monster said, opening his medikit.

Price checked the time.

They were well behind schedule.

[0700 HOURS LOCAL TIME]

[BZADIAN CONGRESS, CANBERRA]

“Who are you?” Chisnall asked.

The art exhibition area was a large, open gallery situated at the rear of the main entrance to the Congress, through a wide set of double doors. Remodelled by Bzadian architects in the Bzadian style, the walls were undulating curves like ocean waves. The floor was a maze of circular columns. You could get lost in this vast hall, a forest of art. Lighting was low, with spotlights illuminating each painting. They stood and walked in shadows. It was the perfect place for a clandestine meeting.

When Chisnall had arrived, she was standing near the entrance, admiring a landscape that, judging by its content, had to have been painted on Bzadia. It showed an endless desert and two moons. She had ignored him and Chisnall had taken her cue, walking straight past her and into the gallery itself, stopping to examine some works not far from the entrance.

It had taken him longer than he had planned to reach the gallery. There had been a moment in the meeting room when he had almost lost it.

Goezlin.

The face, the thin high cheekbones, the shrill, strained voice. It was a vision from his nightmares, from his first-ever Angel mission. Goezlin had been at Uluru. He was the chief of the Bzadian Secret Police, the PGZ and, as such, technically a member of the High Council, although this was the first time Chisnall had ever seen him at a meeting.

Goezlin was the cause of the strangeness that had come over him earlier in the meeting room, he had no doubt about it.

Had Goezlin recognised Chisnall? Chisnall couldn’t be sure. His appearance had been changed. Not dramatically, but enough. The colour pattern of your skin was a major identification feature to Bzadians, as was the shape of your skull. To human eyes the odd “corn-kernel” shape of the Bzadian skulls all looked the same, but to Bzadian eyes, minute differences were extremely important. The shape of the eyes and nose were secondary. He had fooled facial recognition software to gain a position in the kitchen at Government House, but would it be enough to fool Goezlin?