Categories > Books > Harry Potter > The Rise and Fall of an Empire
Newcastle, England, the United Kingdom
0825 GMT, 21 December 2001
Harry Potter walked up to the Colonel who was handing out the individual assignments for the members of Force Sigma, and when he found out his particular assignment, he was, shall we say, less than pleased.
“Hey Harry! What’s your assignment? Mine is a PR and recruiting tour through Scotland and all of its wonders and peoples.” Neville Longbottom, Harry’s best friend, asked him excitedly.
“I don’t believe it. I just don’t fucking believe it. Why would they send /me/ of all people to pick that bitch up?” He continued in his own monologue almost as if he had not even heard Neville.
“Harry, focus, we have met a lot of women who could qualify for the title of bitch. Now which one are you talking about, maybe it’s the one who tried to poison Gabby, you know Lavender.”
“Neville, I am talking about the bitch, the one with a capital B. I am fairly sure you remember the one woman who tried to kill me on four separate occasions, two of which you were present for.” Exasperated, Harry looked at Nev with a slightly incredulous look, as if daring him to say he had forgotten the numerous and sometimes bizarre attempts on his life.
“Of course I remember those two times, mostly because I nearly bought the farm wholesale, first from that snake, and then from that falling sculpture. I never have figured out exactly why she would try to kill you with a snake, when you can speak to them, but then again, do I really want to know how her mind works?”
“Probably no, but anyway, she was captured in Germany about two weeks ago, in the aftermath of a firefight between the Bundeswehr and the Danish Army. The Germans took her to some place near Munich, a psych hospital, and they have not been able to make heads nor tails of her, so they decided that they should extradite her here, to persons who quote-unquote ‘know her better’. Personally, I think she is completely insane, and this is supported by the fact that up until two weeks ago, I was receiving daily ‘love notes’ from her. She kept on blathering about how we would be so happy living together, with our three children, named Lily, James and Albus Severus. Why in the nine circles of hell would I name anything after those two god damned manipulative assholes, unless I was going to destroy the so-named thing soon after and in a very violent way? I spend at least an hour every day sticking pins into little Dumbledore and Snape dolls, which is usually a good indication that you hate someone, is it not? You should know, because you have seen what I play darts with; I mean I only have three boards and each one has a different face on it.”
Completely ignoring the ranting portion of his friend’s diatribe, Neville focused on the more important aspects of Harry’s ramblings, which came up whenever someone mentioned the obsessive red haired witch. “They captured her alive?! Last time we saw her, she took out an entire squad of twenty Hit Wizards and half of ‘em in hand to hand combat, in which she did admittedly have the advantage. I would have thought it would have taken a frickin’ tank to get her down without severe casualties, or at least without having to paralyze her from the waist down, although to be honest, she scares the bloody hell out of me.”
Smiling grimly, Harry said, “From the rumors I hear, it took a squad of tanks to knock her for a loop, and from the little I have heard through the diplomatic channels, it took nearly ten people to hold her in the isolation unit of the hospital.”
With much sarcasm, Neville told Harry in a deadpan monotone voice, “Thank oh so much. You have just given me something new to put in my nightmares, along with the old Bat pleasuring himself and the sight of Dumbledore, Flitwick and Moody in a ménage à trois.”
“Where in bleeding heck do you come up with those things you nutter? Just saying those ungodly images made me lose my appetite and probably destroyed my libido for the next few years, and if that has happened, you would do best avoiding Gabby for the duration.”
“Why do you call them ungodly, I though you were an atheist?”
“No, I’m a Pagan. That, however, is completely beside the point, which is that I am telling you that your imagination is down in depths few dare to tread.”
Just then, Terry Boot, an ever-annoying bug on the windshield of life, chirped into the conversation, adding quite unhelpfully, “You might want to leave on that tour now; otherwise she might kill you before she leaves on her assignment to the Pyrenees.”
“Thank you for the smashing advice Terr; maybe next you could go inform Weasely twins that they are related, because that is the only thing more obvious than what you just said.” Neville said, while shoving the intruder away rather violently. As he did so, he gave a fair impersonation of the Snape Glare of Death©, and although it was no substitute for the real thing, he had made it his own way of announcing “Cave Canem”.
As they reached the area where the helicopters were waiting for the various passengers, Harry told them, “Well gentlemen, this is my stop. Thank you all for coming and I must bid you adieu and goodbye.” He ran up to the V-22 that would ferry him to Sweden, and from there he would move to Finland, after that came just to the east of Moscow, then southeastern Poland and finally into the heart of Bavarian Germany, where he would be joined by six heavily armed guards who would escort both he and the prisoner back to England.
On the tilt-rotor, he found out that the route back to England would take him through Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Egypt, Turkey, Lithuania and Sweden twice, making him ponder whether the routes had been planned by Mad Eye, so that no would follow them. He also found out that for this mission his superiors would give him a new weapon, built by the Americans, something they called a Shrike assault machine gun, which he figured would probably be enough to keep Ginerva Weasely under control. Moreover, if it did not manage to deter her, he always had his Desert Eagle with him, to drive home any point might want to make, or he could just say he caught her trying to escape. With only a couple of sputters the twin piston engines came to life, surrounding him with the quick and steady thrumming of the cross-rotor connection, slowly lulling him to a deep dreamless sleep, something he didn’t get enough of.
Just off the coast of Fujian, the South China Seas
1621 GMT, 21 December 2001 (12:21 Local, 22 December 2001)
VAdm. Delilah Porter and fifteen other SEALs were riding in a C-130J Super Hercules, waiting for the drop signal, which would send them out the back into wild blue yonder, and into the execution of a HALO jump.
“Okay ladies and gentlemen, I want no mistakes on this mission. When we land, put your NVGs on mode two, and make sure that you shake any fleas, am I clear?”
In unison, fourteen of those present gave a load and clear answer of “Yes, ma’am!”
The only one who did not answer the admiral was First Lieutenant Zolfo Zale, who was the second oldest of the team, after the admiral herself, and he had the amazing talent of being able to sleep on a demolitions range, through an air raid, some even thought he could sleep through Pearl Harbor. He was a language specialist in both Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese, the team considered him an invaluable resource on any mission in Southeast Asia, and he was fairly versed in some of the other widespread languages of the area, such as Vietnamese and Cambodian.
She shook him out of his slumber in her own, “gentle and tender” way: by squirting a tiny bit of lemon juice into his left eye, thus waking him up and ensuring that he would be awake for the next few hours or so. An unfortunate side effect of her signature wakeup call however is that for the next 45 minutes or so, he would be unable to stop blinking, and his vision would be blurry for the next half hour, unless of course he splashed some water into his eyes, which is why he always carried a bottle of distilled water on his person.
“AAAHH! You god damned sadistic fuck; you could have just punched me in the shoulder! That is how everyone else wakes me up you know that very well! Oh, God that stings like nothing else.” This is Zale, a somewhat salt-and-pepper man with many scars from former operations with USSOCOM, and a past very few know of or ever will, and even fewer will muster up the courage to ask about it.
“Well, I’m sorry Zale, but I’m not everyone else am I? You know that I reserve that little treatment for those who fall asleep when I am speaking, so you know you had to pay the piper.” Her already harsh features twisted into a cruel smile, making some of the FNG’s shudder at the downright spine-chilling sight, and even some of those who had worked with her grimaced.
“OK, ma’am, I get the point. Now could you please stop smiling, it’s utterly disturbing to see something like that smiling.”
Just then, before the admiral could jab at Zale for his commentary, the entire cargo area was bathed in a red light, letting all those inside know they were over the drop zone, and this caused a veritable snowstorm of action.
The jump supervisor stood by the back ramp, waiting for the ramp to stop moving. As soon as it was stationary, he called out to the waiting SEALs.
“Okay ladies; let’s get your sorry asses out of the plane and onto the ground. Go! Go! Go!”
Within two minutes, every one of the SEALs had jumped out, and the Hercules turned for home, releasing flares and bursts of chaff to draw several SA-3 GOA and Kai Shan missiles away from its body, which might make for an early end to its service life.
As they fell, they saw bright flashes of ack-ack bursting below them, as it seemed that the radar operators had misjudged the Hercules’ correct altitude by nearly three thousand feet, although how this happened, is still under some debate. Normally a HALO jump is dangerous enough even in perfect conditions, but at night and with enemy flak below you, its as close to being a kamikaze run as you can get, without actually going on a kamikaze mission, because if you delay opening your chute for even a second, you’re most likely dead. As they fell, a single thought ran through their collective minds, which went something like “Dear Lord, please don’t let me die in the air,” a thought which was repeated along with empty promises of what would be done in exchange for said wish being granted.
Whether it was luck or divine providence which got them all safely through the firestorm coming from all directions, is anyone’s guess, but all sixteen of them made through the thousands of bursting shells. As the fell through the main conglomeration of the airbursts, with every burst they could see their deaths written in flashes of fire and steely fragments of the 57 mm and the 88 mm cannon shells exploding around them.
At five hundred feet, they pulled the ripcords on their chutes, opening them just before they met a sudden stop after their long drop, and they gently floated down to their target area, about two kilometers away from a compound where the main communications center for the regional military was located, deep in the Quanzhou prefecture.
“Johnson, you go left with Rivoli, Marks, and Beasley and you had better be sure to cover our asses. I do not want to find myself shot just because something completely immaterial to the mission distracted our snipers. Richards! You, Zale, and DeBernardo are never to be more than five feet away from me at any time for any reason you can think of, is that clear! The rest of you fall out and stick with me.” The admiral quickly took charge of the situation, falling into the comfortable position of being in control of the people around and under her in the hierarchy of command.
Her commands given, the team responded with a quiet affirmative, and the four resident snipers moved off to the north, while the rest of the team moved in a standard arrow formation to the south. They moved at a slow pace, only 5 kilometers per hour, always scanning through the trees on the look out for security forces or something that could give away their position, and several times, they changed their path to avoid being followed by trackers.
Twenty-six minutes after they landed, the two parts of the team met up just outside the security fence of the compound, to go over the finer points of the operation they were about to perform, and to make sure everyone of them was on the same page of the same playbook.
“Okay ladies and gentlemen, I remind you that this a simple in and out job, no fancy heroics, no showboating, and absolutely no sticking around after the final bell, because if you do stick around, you will be on your own. You snipers will take up positions at the perimeter of the compound -the exact place will be left to you, but make sure that you have a good view of the entire area- and they will make sure that once we are inside, nobody from the outside decides to crash the party. We are here to knock out the comms in preparation for the invasion, and that is the only thing we are here to do, so do not get any ideas of doing anything stupid; yes, Jensen I am talking about you! The little stunt you pulled in North Korea in ‘97 almost sent the North into the South, along with the People’s Republic of China on their heels, so don’t get any ideas or I will shoot you and claim it was a lucky shot from the enemy, am I perfectly clear?”
Jensen remembered his ‘little stunt’ as the admiral had called it, and after what she had done to him then, which bordered on the realms of torture, he was in no hurry to cross her again. He responded meekly with a single word, “Crystal,” which sounded almost strangled by fear and submission, both ingrained after being with the admiral for several years on the same SEAL team. She forced him to watch every single Barney episode, four times in succession, which caused quite a bit of subconscious scarring, evidenced in that Jensen’s nightmares now consisted of a large singing purple dinosaur permanently moving into his apartment. From that point on, all anyone had to do to get him to leave the area post haste was start humming the first few bars of any of the regular songs, and he would either run away quickly, or curl up into a fetal position and start screaming.
“Ok, does everybody know what they have to do? Good. Let’s go.”
The admiral stealthily cut the concertina wire that blocked the way into the complex, and then she staked it back to allow room to crawl through, and with that, she moved through the wire, grabbing her rifle a moment later. The twelve SEALs moved through the complex, staying out of the floodlights range as much as possible, when it was not possible to avoid the light they quickly shot them out, making the way safe for general movement. The four snipers had been shooting every sentry they could see through their thermal imaging scopes, and they tried as hard as they could to take single shots through the head, making sure that they dropped their targets quickly and quietly.
Unfortunately, they could see the oncoming guard shift, which noticed several of their downed comrades, which made them immediately hit the alarm, lighting up the compound with dozens of florescent lights.
“Oh shit! Well, so much for secrecy, lets go balls to the wall, boys!” Admiral Porter was now in her element, a real knock down fight, where there is always a clear winner and many losers. She switched her M8 assault rifle from safety to its three round burst setting, and leveled it to the first enemy she saw. She squeezed the trigger, two went down, and so began one of the first true firefights of the Third World War.
The snipers were busy trying to cover the now rapidly evolving situation, taking shots where and when they could, but with their targets moving around so much it was getting very difficult to tell friend from foe. The turning point came when Beasley shot out the main generator, which powered the exterior lights, and from there on out it became a massacre, as the Americans had something that drastically put the battle in their favor, generation six night-vision goggles, which could see into the near infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Even in the dark, wild shots can be dangerous, which Ensign Jensen found out through personal experience and three lucky, or unlucky –depending whose viewpoint, you are using— shots from a Chinese gunner. Three 5.65-millimeter rounds from a Russian-made RPK-74 sub-machine gun pierced his flak jacket; one nicked his left lung, another embedded itself into his left renal artery, causing a fair amount of internal bleeding, and the last penetrated his spinal column at the fifth lumbar vertebrae, effectively paralyzing him.
His anguished screams of pain filled the air, drawing both attention and incoming fire towards him. “Oh God! I’ve been hit! Somebody help me, plea--” Admiral Porter cut off his screams by knocking him out with a swift kick to the head, something her teammates greatly appreciated, as they had enough trouble with the Chinese without him drawing attention to them.
After three minutes of intense fighting, the SpecOps team had neutralized most of the second security shift, and the few survivors they silenced with extreme prejudice.
“Come on, let’s get downstairs and blow this joint. The longer we are here, the more likely it is that the real army will show up and put us six feet under, something I have been avoiding of late.” The admiral called out the team, and radioed the snipers to be on the look out for any incoming forces on the road from Fuzhou.
They entered the building, a place where Lieutenant Zale proved his worth, in both guiding the team and gathering vital intelligence from the computers, in which everything was in Chinese ideographs.
When the reached a four way intersection, Zale was asked which way to the control center, and he responded with a somewhat cryptic statement which baffled several members of the team. “Yeah, I think it’s this way {pointing to the left}, either that or we should have taken that turn at Albuquerque.”
They reached the control room just as the snipers radioed in that it looked like a full company of armor was coming in from Fuzhou, and a platoon of infantry was coming with them. This understandably caused some commotion with the remaining SEALs, for they had very few anti-armor weapons on their collective persons, thus a battle with Chinese armor would be a very one-sided fight. In fact, the only weapons that they had with them that could penetrate the multi-centimeter thick metal plates were the sniper rifles, specifically the M154 20 mm Barretts, which could easily put a fourteen-ounce slug into anything within range. The admiral thus ordered the snipers to keep the armor busy, and to take out as many tanks as they could while staying out of the field of fire as much as they possibly could, while the team at the base set their satchel charges and IEDs.
Beasley quickly changed magazines to the High Explosive shaped charge rounds, which could blast through up to 2.11 inches of super-hard vanadium carbide at just less than 2000 ft, and the armor used to make the frontal glacis plate is considerably less durable than vanadium carbide. With the first shot, taken from just under 1200 ft, the round easily penetrated the front glacis plate, spraying the driver and gunner with a molten jet of copper, melting the controls and turning the armored weapons system into a sixty-ton roadblock. The projectile moved so quickly, at just under Mach 5.6, that tracing where it had come from was a futile effort, and even the magnesium-iridium tracer charges on the slugs, did not help much. All the Chinese troops knew was that the shot came from a general direction, from the general area of their destination, which meant that the shooters could be anywhere in a ninety degree arc from the from of the column.
With every shot, another tank went up in flames, and some even had secondary explosions from the ammo stored within its steel belly, scattering the infantry in all directions and causing the remaining armor to begin firing wildly in the general direction of the snipers. Nearly all of the shots missed by half a kilometer, sending a lot of timber up in smoke, lighting numerous fires and even demolishing the nearby radio relay towers, something that the SEALs no longer had to do.
Rivoli called over the TacCom net to the demolitions team, “Hey, are you guys almost done in there? The armor is no factor and the infantry is scattered, but I’m pretty sure that very soon we’ll have more company than is generally welcome.”
“Yeah Rivoli, we’re almost done, so don’t get your shorts in a knot. We just have to set the timers and we’ll be out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” The admiral acknowledged
Zale then chirped up with some information he had gathered from the abundant communication monitoring equipment. “Well, ladies and gents I think we have officially worn out our welcome. Currently there is a flight of 12 Mi-24 Hind E helos coming in to both make sure we do not leave, and to bring in a platoon of infantry to undo what we are doing. They are about fifteen minutes out so I propose we leave immediately and don’t look back.”
“Okay boys, were done on this end. Johnson, Rivoli! You two go set up the signaling beacon at the rendezvous point, the helo should be there within ten minutes and so will we. Marks and Beasley, you keep a close tail on them, but keep scanning the skies to make sure that those helos don’t show up before we can get to the extraction area.”
“Right-on boss lady, we’ll do that. Johnson and I will set up the beacon, and – Oh shit! Sorry we have to run, a patrol just found us.” A loud explosion echoed through the handheld transceiver, and then Rivoli’s voice came through. “How do you like the taste of an M67 grenade you fuckin’ chinks?!”
“Rivoli! That is not cool! Never use language like that in my presence, unless you want the Barney torture. You’ve been with me for several years, so you should know what not to do ” The admiral may have been a tough-as-nails, grade-A bitch with little regard for feelings or incompetence, but the one thing she would not tolerate is discrimination of any kind. She had faced enough of it during her training at BUD/S, and as the only female in the SEALs, she went after discrimination like a bloodhound after a scent, or like a wolf on the hunt and by God, she would tear the offender apart if they did not repent.
“Yes, Ma’am, sorry ma’am,” came the subdued reply over the radio.
Five minutes later the two parts of the team met at the extraction point, with one prisoner carried by Anton DeBernardo, and Jensen carried by James Richards, both of whom were effectively invalid for the time being, thus the necessity of being carried. The MH-53 arrived three minutes later, along with three RAH-66 Comanche providing cover fire and general protection for both the PAVE LOW and the ground troops.
The lead Comanche pilot began radioing the ground team and updating them on the situation. “SEAL 1 this is Lynx 1-1, I am picking up multiple signals bearing down on our position from both the land and air. You had better get your sorry butts into the chopper, unless you want to do an impersonation of Swiss cheese.”
“Roger that Lynx 1-1, we are in the chopper. Let us go home. Lynx 1, do see any fireworks?” The admiral just had to ask whether the mission was a success.
“That we do Admiral, and they are a beauty. It looks like the entire complex is gone, how much C-4 did you use?” Lynx 1-3, playing tail end Charlie, had a perfect view into the valley, and indeed the entire complex was one massive fireball, mostly because directly below the control centre for the communications equipment, there was a storeroom for numerous types of defensive weaponry, and across from that was a fuel storage room for the generators.
“Good to know Lynx 1, and we used a moderate amount, so even in a best case scenario, only the building we hit should be destroyed, so don’t look at us. We will just chalk it up to lousy construction on the part of former People’s Republic of China, about par with everything else they did. This is SEAL 1 signing off.”
As the MH-53L lifted off the ground, Lynx 1-3 saw the incoming flight of Hind helos, and told the other two to lock on with their Sidewinders and fire away. Lynx 1-3 locked on to the lead Hind with his forward-looking infrared and squeezed the trigger, firing both his M197 gun and letting a Sidewinder into the air, letting the tracer bullets burn towards the offending Hind E. They only had to delay the Hinds from getting within firing range just long enough to allow the Pave Low to make it to full speed and from there nothing short of a missile could catch it, and ground fire is inherently inaccurate when shooting at a low altitude fast moving target.
The missile covered the four miles to the target in less than thirty seconds, and even though the Hind launched a flare, but that didn’t the seeker head on the missile for even a moment, and it plowed straight into the cockpit of the lead helo, immolating the pilot and copilot, and igniting the fuel, making for a very big boom. As luck would have it, some of the burning shrapnel pierced the fuel tanks of the two nearest Hinds in the formation, making them explode very violently, sending molten metal and charred flesh screaming through the air, starting even more fires in the forestry below. Lynx 1-1 and 1-2 saw this bit of good fortune and began firing as quickly as they could lock onto a target, and within only a couple of minutes the entire flight of Hinds was demolished beyond any possible recognition. The three Comanche helos turned to join the Pave Low on its flight to home, thus ending a nearly perfect SpecOps mission, but just beginning one of the first major allied operations of the war.
0825 GMT, 21 December 2001
Harry Potter walked up to the Colonel who was handing out the individual assignments for the members of Force Sigma, and when he found out his particular assignment, he was, shall we say, less than pleased.
“Hey Harry! What’s your assignment? Mine is a PR and recruiting tour through Scotland and all of its wonders and peoples.” Neville Longbottom, Harry’s best friend, asked him excitedly.
“I don’t believe it. I just don’t fucking believe it. Why would they send /me/ of all people to pick that bitch up?” He continued in his own monologue almost as if he had not even heard Neville.
“Harry, focus, we have met a lot of women who could qualify for the title of bitch. Now which one are you talking about, maybe it’s the one who tried to poison Gabby, you know Lavender.”
“Neville, I am talking about the bitch, the one with a capital B. I am fairly sure you remember the one woman who tried to kill me on four separate occasions, two of which you were present for.” Exasperated, Harry looked at Nev with a slightly incredulous look, as if daring him to say he had forgotten the numerous and sometimes bizarre attempts on his life.
“Of course I remember those two times, mostly because I nearly bought the farm wholesale, first from that snake, and then from that falling sculpture. I never have figured out exactly why she would try to kill you with a snake, when you can speak to them, but then again, do I really want to know how her mind works?”
“Probably no, but anyway, she was captured in Germany about two weeks ago, in the aftermath of a firefight between the Bundeswehr and the Danish Army. The Germans took her to some place near Munich, a psych hospital, and they have not been able to make heads nor tails of her, so they decided that they should extradite her here, to persons who quote-unquote ‘know her better’. Personally, I think she is completely insane, and this is supported by the fact that up until two weeks ago, I was receiving daily ‘love notes’ from her. She kept on blathering about how we would be so happy living together, with our three children, named Lily, James and Albus Severus. Why in the nine circles of hell would I name anything after those two god damned manipulative assholes, unless I was going to destroy the so-named thing soon after and in a very violent way? I spend at least an hour every day sticking pins into little Dumbledore and Snape dolls, which is usually a good indication that you hate someone, is it not? You should know, because you have seen what I play darts with; I mean I only have three boards and each one has a different face on it.”
Completely ignoring the ranting portion of his friend’s diatribe, Neville focused on the more important aspects of Harry’s ramblings, which came up whenever someone mentioned the obsessive red haired witch. “They captured her alive?! Last time we saw her, she took out an entire squad of twenty Hit Wizards and half of ‘em in hand to hand combat, in which she did admittedly have the advantage. I would have thought it would have taken a frickin’ tank to get her down without severe casualties, or at least without having to paralyze her from the waist down, although to be honest, she scares the bloody hell out of me.”
Smiling grimly, Harry said, “From the rumors I hear, it took a squad of tanks to knock her for a loop, and from the little I have heard through the diplomatic channels, it took nearly ten people to hold her in the isolation unit of the hospital.”
With much sarcasm, Neville told Harry in a deadpan monotone voice, “Thank oh so much. You have just given me something new to put in my nightmares, along with the old Bat pleasuring himself and the sight of Dumbledore, Flitwick and Moody in a ménage à trois.”
“Where in bleeding heck do you come up with those things you nutter? Just saying those ungodly images made me lose my appetite and probably destroyed my libido for the next few years, and if that has happened, you would do best avoiding Gabby for the duration.”
“Why do you call them ungodly, I though you were an atheist?”
“No, I’m a Pagan. That, however, is completely beside the point, which is that I am telling you that your imagination is down in depths few dare to tread.”
Just then, Terry Boot, an ever-annoying bug on the windshield of life, chirped into the conversation, adding quite unhelpfully, “You might want to leave on that tour now; otherwise she might kill you before she leaves on her assignment to the Pyrenees.”
“Thank you for the smashing advice Terr; maybe next you could go inform Weasely twins that they are related, because that is the only thing more obvious than what you just said.” Neville said, while shoving the intruder away rather violently. As he did so, he gave a fair impersonation of the Snape Glare of Death©, and although it was no substitute for the real thing, he had made it his own way of announcing “Cave Canem”.
As they reached the area where the helicopters were waiting for the various passengers, Harry told them, “Well gentlemen, this is my stop. Thank you all for coming and I must bid you adieu and goodbye.” He ran up to the V-22 that would ferry him to Sweden, and from there he would move to Finland, after that came just to the east of Moscow, then southeastern Poland and finally into the heart of Bavarian Germany, where he would be joined by six heavily armed guards who would escort both he and the prisoner back to England.
On the tilt-rotor, he found out that the route back to England would take him through Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Egypt, Turkey, Lithuania and Sweden twice, making him ponder whether the routes had been planned by Mad Eye, so that no would follow them. He also found out that for this mission his superiors would give him a new weapon, built by the Americans, something they called a Shrike assault machine gun, which he figured would probably be enough to keep Ginerva Weasely under control. Moreover, if it did not manage to deter her, he always had his Desert Eagle with him, to drive home any point might want to make, or he could just say he caught her trying to escape. With only a couple of sputters the twin piston engines came to life, surrounding him with the quick and steady thrumming of the cross-rotor connection, slowly lulling him to a deep dreamless sleep, something he didn’t get enough of.
Just off the coast of Fujian, the South China Seas
1621 GMT, 21 December 2001 (12:21 Local, 22 December 2001)
VAdm. Delilah Porter and fifteen other SEALs were riding in a C-130J Super Hercules, waiting for the drop signal, which would send them out the back into wild blue yonder, and into the execution of a HALO jump.
“Okay ladies and gentlemen, I want no mistakes on this mission. When we land, put your NVGs on mode two, and make sure that you shake any fleas, am I clear?”
In unison, fourteen of those present gave a load and clear answer of “Yes, ma’am!”
The only one who did not answer the admiral was First Lieutenant Zolfo Zale, who was the second oldest of the team, after the admiral herself, and he had the amazing talent of being able to sleep on a demolitions range, through an air raid, some even thought he could sleep through Pearl Harbor. He was a language specialist in both Mandarin and Cantonese Chinese, the team considered him an invaluable resource on any mission in Southeast Asia, and he was fairly versed in some of the other widespread languages of the area, such as Vietnamese and Cambodian.
She shook him out of his slumber in her own, “gentle and tender” way: by squirting a tiny bit of lemon juice into his left eye, thus waking him up and ensuring that he would be awake for the next few hours or so. An unfortunate side effect of her signature wakeup call however is that for the next 45 minutes or so, he would be unable to stop blinking, and his vision would be blurry for the next half hour, unless of course he splashed some water into his eyes, which is why he always carried a bottle of distilled water on his person.
“AAAHH! You god damned sadistic fuck; you could have just punched me in the shoulder! That is how everyone else wakes me up you know that very well! Oh, God that stings like nothing else.” This is Zale, a somewhat salt-and-pepper man with many scars from former operations with USSOCOM, and a past very few know of or ever will, and even fewer will muster up the courage to ask about it.
“Well, I’m sorry Zale, but I’m not everyone else am I? You know that I reserve that little treatment for those who fall asleep when I am speaking, so you know you had to pay the piper.” Her already harsh features twisted into a cruel smile, making some of the FNG’s shudder at the downright spine-chilling sight, and even some of those who had worked with her grimaced.
“OK, ma’am, I get the point. Now could you please stop smiling, it’s utterly disturbing to see something like that smiling.”
Just then, before the admiral could jab at Zale for his commentary, the entire cargo area was bathed in a red light, letting all those inside know they were over the drop zone, and this caused a veritable snowstorm of action.
The jump supervisor stood by the back ramp, waiting for the ramp to stop moving. As soon as it was stationary, he called out to the waiting SEALs.
“Okay ladies; let’s get your sorry asses out of the plane and onto the ground. Go! Go! Go!”
Within two minutes, every one of the SEALs had jumped out, and the Hercules turned for home, releasing flares and bursts of chaff to draw several SA-3 GOA and Kai Shan missiles away from its body, which might make for an early end to its service life.
As they fell, they saw bright flashes of ack-ack bursting below them, as it seemed that the radar operators had misjudged the Hercules’ correct altitude by nearly three thousand feet, although how this happened, is still under some debate. Normally a HALO jump is dangerous enough even in perfect conditions, but at night and with enemy flak below you, its as close to being a kamikaze run as you can get, without actually going on a kamikaze mission, because if you delay opening your chute for even a second, you’re most likely dead. As they fell, a single thought ran through their collective minds, which went something like “Dear Lord, please don’t let me die in the air,” a thought which was repeated along with empty promises of what would be done in exchange for said wish being granted.
Whether it was luck or divine providence which got them all safely through the firestorm coming from all directions, is anyone’s guess, but all sixteen of them made through the thousands of bursting shells. As the fell through the main conglomeration of the airbursts, with every burst they could see their deaths written in flashes of fire and steely fragments of the 57 mm and the 88 mm cannon shells exploding around them.
At five hundred feet, they pulled the ripcords on their chutes, opening them just before they met a sudden stop after their long drop, and they gently floated down to their target area, about two kilometers away from a compound where the main communications center for the regional military was located, deep in the Quanzhou prefecture.
“Johnson, you go left with Rivoli, Marks, and Beasley and you had better be sure to cover our asses. I do not want to find myself shot just because something completely immaterial to the mission distracted our snipers. Richards! You, Zale, and DeBernardo are never to be more than five feet away from me at any time for any reason you can think of, is that clear! The rest of you fall out and stick with me.” The admiral quickly took charge of the situation, falling into the comfortable position of being in control of the people around and under her in the hierarchy of command.
Her commands given, the team responded with a quiet affirmative, and the four resident snipers moved off to the north, while the rest of the team moved in a standard arrow formation to the south. They moved at a slow pace, only 5 kilometers per hour, always scanning through the trees on the look out for security forces or something that could give away their position, and several times, they changed their path to avoid being followed by trackers.
Twenty-six minutes after they landed, the two parts of the team met up just outside the security fence of the compound, to go over the finer points of the operation they were about to perform, and to make sure everyone of them was on the same page of the same playbook.
“Okay ladies and gentlemen, I remind you that this a simple in and out job, no fancy heroics, no showboating, and absolutely no sticking around after the final bell, because if you do stick around, you will be on your own. You snipers will take up positions at the perimeter of the compound -the exact place will be left to you, but make sure that you have a good view of the entire area- and they will make sure that once we are inside, nobody from the outside decides to crash the party. We are here to knock out the comms in preparation for the invasion, and that is the only thing we are here to do, so do not get any ideas of doing anything stupid; yes, Jensen I am talking about you! The little stunt you pulled in North Korea in ‘97 almost sent the North into the South, along with the People’s Republic of China on their heels, so don’t get any ideas or I will shoot you and claim it was a lucky shot from the enemy, am I perfectly clear?”
Jensen remembered his ‘little stunt’ as the admiral had called it, and after what she had done to him then, which bordered on the realms of torture, he was in no hurry to cross her again. He responded meekly with a single word, “Crystal,” which sounded almost strangled by fear and submission, both ingrained after being with the admiral for several years on the same SEAL team. She forced him to watch every single Barney episode, four times in succession, which caused quite a bit of subconscious scarring, evidenced in that Jensen’s nightmares now consisted of a large singing purple dinosaur permanently moving into his apartment. From that point on, all anyone had to do to get him to leave the area post haste was start humming the first few bars of any of the regular songs, and he would either run away quickly, or curl up into a fetal position and start screaming.
“Ok, does everybody know what they have to do? Good. Let’s go.”
The admiral stealthily cut the concertina wire that blocked the way into the complex, and then she staked it back to allow room to crawl through, and with that, she moved through the wire, grabbing her rifle a moment later. The twelve SEALs moved through the complex, staying out of the floodlights range as much as possible, when it was not possible to avoid the light they quickly shot them out, making the way safe for general movement. The four snipers had been shooting every sentry they could see through their thermal imaging scopes, and they tried as hard as they could to take single shots through the head, making sure that they dropped their targets quickly and quietly.
Unfortunately, they could see the oncoming guard shift, which noticed several of their downed comrades, which made them immediately hit the alarm, lighting up the compound with dozens of florescent lights.
“Oh shit! Well, so much for secrecy, lets go balls to the wall, boys!” Admiral Porter was now in her element, a real knock down fight, where there is always a clear winner and many losers. She switched her M8 assault rifle from safety to its three round burst setting, and leveled it to the first enemy she saw. She squeezed the trigger, two went down, and so began one of the first true firefights of the Third World War.
The snipers were busy trying to cover the now rapidly evolving situation, taking shots where and when they could, but with their targets moving around so much it was getting very difficult to tell friend from foe. The turning point came when Beasley shot out the main generator, which powered the exterior lights, and from there on out it became a massacre, as the Americans had something that drastically put the battle in their favor, generation six night-vision goggles, which could see into the near infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum. Even in the dark, wild shots can be dangerous, which Ensign Jensen found out through personal experience and three lucky, or unlucky –depending whose viewpoint, you are using— shots from a Chinese gunner. Three 5.65-millimeter rounds from a Russian-made RPK-74 sub-machine gun pierced his flak jacket; one nicked his left lung, another embedded itself into his left renal artery, causing a fair amount of internal bleeding, and the last penetrated his spinal column at the fifth lumbar vertebrae, effectively paralyzing him.
His anguished screams of pain filled the air, drawing both attention and incoming fire towards him. “Oh God! I’ve been hit! Somebody help me, plea--” Admiral Porter cut off his screams by knocking him out with a swift kick to the head, something her teammates greatly appreciated, as they had enough trouble with the Chinese without him drawing attention to them.
After three minutes of intense fighting, the SpecOps team had neutralized most of the second security shift, and the few survivors they silenced with extreme prejudice.
“Come on, let’s get downstairs and blow this joint. The longer we are here, the more likely it is that the real army will show up and put us six feet under, something I have been avoiding of late.” The admiral called out the team, and radioed the snipers to be on the look out for any incoming forces on the road from Fuzhou.
They entered the building, a place where Lieutenant Zale proved his worth, in both guiding the team and gathering vital intelligence from the computers, in which everything was in Chinese ideographs.
When the reached a four way intersection, Zale was asked which way to the control center, and he responded with a somewhat cryptic statement which baffled several members of the team. “Yeah, I think it’s this way {pointing to the left}, either that or we should have taken that turn at Albuquerque.”
They reached the control room just as the snipers radioed in that it looked like a full company of armor was coming in from Fuzhou, and a platoon of infantry was coming with them. This understandably caused some commotion with the remaining SEALs, for they had very few anti-armor weapons on their collective persons, thus a battle with Chinese armor would be a very one-sided fight. In fact, the only weapons that they had with them that could penetrate the multi-centimeter thick metal plates were the sniper rifles, specifically the M154 20 mm Barretts, which could easily put a fourteen-ounce slug into anything within range. The admiral thus ordered the snipers to keep the armor busy, and to take out as many tanks as they could while staying out of the field of fire as much as they possibly could, while the team at the base set their satchel charges and IEDs.
Beasley quickly changed magazines to the High Explosive shaped charge rounds, which could blast through up to 2.11 inches of super-hard vanadium carbide at just less than 2000 ft, and the armor used to make the frontal glacis plate is considerably less durable than vanadium carbide. With the first shot, taken from just under 1200 ft, the round easily penetrated the front glacis plate, spraying the driver and gunner with a molten jet of copper, melting the controls and turning the armored weapons system into a sixty-ton roadblock. The projectile moved so quickly, at just under Mach 5.6, that tracing where it had come from was a futile effort, and even the magnesium-iridium tracer charges on the slugs, did not help much. All the Chinese troops knew was that the shot came from a general direction, from the general area of their destination, which meant that the shooters could be anywhere in a ninety degree arc from the from of the column.
With every shot, another tank went up in flames, and some even had secondary explosions from the ammo stored within its steel belly, scattering the infantry in all directions and causing the remaining armor to begin firing wildly in the general direction of the snipers. Nearly all of the shots missed by half a kilometer, sending a lot of timber up in smoke, lighting numerous fires and even demolishing the nearby radio relay towers, something that the SEALs no longer had to do.
Rivoli called over the TacCom net to the demolitions team, “Hey, are you guys almost done in there? The armor is no factor and the infantry is scattered, but I’m pretty sure that very soon we’ll have more company than is generally welcome.”
“Yeah Rivoli, we’re almost done, so don’t get your shorts in a knot. We just have to set the timers and we’ll be out in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” The admiral acknowledged
Zale then chirped up with some information he had gathered from the abundant communication monitoring equipment. “Well, ladies and gents I think we have officially worn out our welcome. Currently there is a flight of 12 Mi-24 Hind E helos coming in to both make sure we do not leave, and to bring in a platoon of infantry to undo what we are doing. They are about fifteen minutes out so I propose we leave immediately and don’t look back.”
“Okay boys, were done on this end. Johnson, Rivoli! You two go set up the signaling beacon at the rendezvous point, the helo should be there within ten minutes and so will we. Marks and Beasley, you keep a close tail on them, but keep scanning the skies to make sure that those helos don’t show up before we can get to the extraction area.”
“Right-on boss lady, we’ll do that. Johnson and I will set up the beacon, and – Oh shit! Sorry we have to run, a patrol just found us.” A loud explosion echoed through the handheld transceiver, and then Rivoli’s voice came through. “How do you like the taste of an M67 grenade you fuckin’ chinks?!”
“Rivoli! That is not cool! Never use language like that in my presence, unless you want the Barney torture. You’ve been with me for several years, so you should know what not to do ” The admiral may have been a tough-as-nails, grade-A bitch with little regard for feelings or incompetence, but the one thing she would not tolerate is discrimination of any kind. She had faced enough of it during her training at BUD/S, and as the only female in the SEALs, she went after discrimination like a bloodhound after a scent, or like a wolf on the hunt and by God, she would tear the offender apart if they did not repent.
“Yes, Ma’am, sorry ma’am,” came the subdued reply over the radio.
Five minutes later the two parts of the team met at the extraction point, with one prisoner carried by Anton DeBernardo, and Jensen carried by James Richards, both of whom were effectively invalid for the time being, thus the necessity of being carried. The MH-53 arrived three minutes later, along with three RAH-66 Comanche providing cover fire and general protection for both the PAVE LOW and the ground troops.
The lead Comanche pilot began radioing the ground team and updating them on the situation. “SEAL 1 this is Lynx 1-1, I am picking up multiple signals bearing down on our position from both the land and air. You had better get your sorry butts into the chopper, unless you want to do an impersonation of Swiss cheese.”
“Roger that Lynx 1-1, we are in the chopper. Let us go home. Lynx 1, do see any fireworks?” The admiral just had to ask whether the mission was a success.
“That we do Admiral, and they are a beauty. It looks like the entire complex is gone, how much C-4 did you use?” Lynx 1-3, playing tail end Charlie, had a perfect view into the valley, and indeed the entire complex was one massive fireball, mostly because directly below the control centre for the communications equipment, there was a storeroom for numerous types of defensive weaponry, and across from that was a fuel storage room for the generators.
“Good to know Lynx 1, and we used a moderate amount, so even in a best case scenario, only the building we hit should be destroyed, so don’t look at us. We will just chalk it up to lousy construction on the part of former People’s Republic of China, about par with everything else they did. This is SEAL 1 signing off.”
As the MH-53L lifted off the ground, Lynx 1-3 saw the incoming flight of Hind helos, and told the other two to lock on with their Sidewinders and fire away. Lynx 1-3 locked on to the lead Hind with his forward-looking infrared and squeezed the trigger, firing both his M197 gun and letting a Sidewinder into the air, letting the tracer bullets burn towards the offending Hind E. They only had to delay the Hinds from getting within firing range just long enough to allow the Pave Low to make it to full speed and from there nothing short of a missile could catch it, and ground fire is inherently inaccurate when shooting at a low altitude fast moving target.
The missile covered the four miles to the target in less than thirty seconds, and even though the Hind launched a flare, but that didn’t the seeker head on the missile for even a moment, and it plowed straight into the cockpit of the lead helo, immolating the pilot and copilot, and igniting the fuel, making for a very big boom. As luck would have it, some of the burning shrapnel pierced the fuel tanks of the two nearest Hinds in the formation, making them explode very violently, sending molten metal and charred flesh screaming through the air, starting even more fires in the forestry below. Lynx 1-1 and 1-2 saw this bit of good fortune and began firing as quickly as they could lock onto a target, and within only a couple of minutes the entire flight of Hinds was demolished beyond any possible recognition. The three Comanche helos turned to join the Pave Low on its flight to home, thus ending a nearly perfect SpecOps mission, but just beginning one of the first major allied operations of the war.
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