The Assault

5. BENDA HILL



[MISSION DAY 5]

[0100 hours]

[Benda Hill, New Bzadia]

THE AMBUSH HAPPENED ON THE LAST DAY OF THEIR HIKE, as they were passing Benda Hill.

After three nights of tabbing, Chisnall was moving more easily, the ragged agony of his back and legs now just a dull, constant throb.

The desert here was vastly different from the scarred hillsides of Mount Morris or the long furrowed dunes of the southern desert. It was flat, and the ground was hard. Had he landed on the semi-inflated half-pipe in this part of the desert, he would not have survived. Benda Hill was a large, rounded knob of rock, protruding from the desert plane. Gray by daylight but green in their NV goggles. The sides looked smooth but the top was pitted and creviced by millions of years of harsh Australian weather.

The loss of Hunter had affected the entire team. Chisnall could feel it. All the training in the world could not prepare you for the first time you lost a comrade.

“Damn this war,” Wilton said, surprising them all with his vehemence. “Damn it. I’m sixteen: I should be shredding the backcountry at Whistler, not busting a gut humping a pack through this hellhole, surrounded by deadly snakes and butt-ugly aliens who want to kill me.”

“I know it,” Price agreed. “I should be hanging out behind the pub, scrounging old cigarette butts out of the sand trays while my dad’s getting smashed inside and my mum is pouring the housekeeping into the pokies.”

“Does anyone here speak Kiwi?” Wilton asked.

Chisnall shook his head. “I have no idea what she said.”

It was Brogan who seemed to understand, resting her hand lightly on Price’s shoulder. “That was home?”

“Nothing ever changes,” Price said.

“Damn this war,” Wilton said again.

“How about you, Monster?” Chisnall asked.

“My dudes, if not for the war, the Monster would be drinking beer with his buddies until he couldn’t see straight.” His booming laugh filled the desert around them.

“You can’t drink beer; you’re only sixteen,” Brogan said.

“I drank some beer once,” Price said. “Didn’t like it much.”

“Me too,” Wilton said. “At least I think it was beer.”

“The Monster is from Röszke, just over the border from Serbia.” Monster looked around and grinned at them. “In Serbia there is no, how do you say, you are old enough for drinking?”

“Legal drinking age,” Chisnall said.

“Aha, legal drinking age. So kids walk to bars in Horgoš and roll all the way back home.” That laugh sounded so loud that Chisnall began to worry how far it would carry in the desert.

“You ever do that, Monster?” Price asked. “Get drunk in Horgoš?”

“Pukes invaded Hungary in ’26. He’d have been, like, twelve,” Brogan said.

Monster nodded. “The Monster was eleven when my family became refugees. America won’t allow the Monster to drink beer till he’s twenty-one.”

“Good thing too,” Price said. “You’re crazy enough when you’re sober.”

“How about you, LT?” Wilton asked. “What would you be doing right now, if not for the war?”

“Sleeping,” Chisnall said.

“Other than that,” Wilton said.

“I don’t know,” Chisnall said. “I never got the chance to figure that out.”

“That isn’t what you told me,” Brogan said.

“Now you gotta tell us,” Price said.

“I’m the LT,” Chisnall said. “I don’t gotta do nothing.”

“So you tell us, Sarge,” Wilton said.

“Sergeant Brogan, I am sure you wouldn’t breach the confidentiality of a discussion between an officer and an NCO,” Chisnall said.

“Of course not, LT,” Brogan said. “These lowlifes are just going to have to wait until you’re a famous TV chef before they find out.”

“TV chef!” Wilton burst out laughing.

“Oops,” Brogan said.

“I never said TV,” Chisnall said.

“I heard it,” Brogan said.

“So why you serve us green crap for meals?” Monster asked. “Can’t a chef do better than that?”

“Especially a famous TV chef,” Price said.

Chisnall sighed. “Look … when I was a kid, before we got recruited—”

“Serves you right for being so good at paintball,” Brogan said.

“If I’d known that it meant getting recruited, I’d have missed every shot,” Wilton said.

“Carry on, LT,” Price said. “I gotta hear this.”

“Well … you know. I was into cooking,” Chisnall said.

“We’d be good friends.” Monster laughed. “The Monster is into eating.”

“I just loved the way you could take a few raw ingredients and add a bit of heat and end up with something completely different,” Chisnall said. “It’s a kind of magic. I always thought I’d like to go to cooking school and learn how to do it properly.”

“Sounds really gay to me,” Wilton said, and got a shove in his back from Brogan for his trouble.

“No, really, I’m just saying,” he said.

“Yeah, and what were you planning to do with your life, Wilton?” Price asked. “Professional snow-bunny? Maybe a snowboard instructor, getting hit on by the arctic cougars in the après-ski?”

“Shut up,” Wilton said.

“I wonder what Hunter’s dreams were,” Price said, and the chill of the night air grew suddenly colder, an icy blanket drawing around them.

“He never even got to fire a shot,” Wilton said.

There was a moment’s silence.

“The Pukes are going to pay for Hunter,” Monster said. “Booyah,” Price said.

“Here we come, you alien mother-shippers,” Wilton said. “You want some of this, Pukes? Come get some. I got enough kick-ass for all you vomit bags.”

“Booyah,” Price said again.

“Wilton,” Chisnall said. “We’re a recon team. We’re not shock troops. If we go in screaming and shooting, that’s pretty much going to screw up our mission, don’t you think?”

Wilton seemed not to have heard him. “My dad took out two Puke LAVs with one rocket during the defense of Okinawa. He just about won the battle by himself.”

“I don’t know if you got the memo, Wilton,” Brogan said, “but we lost Okinawa.”

“Two LAVs! One rocket. Right down the ammo hatch. Goes up like the Fourth of July. Boom! Blows the one next to it right off the road. Over a cliff. Boom, boom, boom, all the way down.”

“Buy one, get one free,” Monster said.

“Guys,” Chisnall said. “Guys, seriously. Listen up. No more talking about killing Pukes. We’re in the heart of Puke country now. We’ve got to start acting and thinking like Pukes. Everything you say, everything you do from now on, you’re a Puke. You want to pick your nose, use two thumbs at once, like they do. You want to scratch your ass, don’t. Pukes see you do that, they’ll spot you for a fraud from a klick away.”

“Don’t Pukes ever get an itchy arse?” Monster asked.

“If they do,” Brogan said, “they’re polite enough not to scratch them in public.”

“Gonna scratch their asses right off our planet,” Wilton said.

“Our planet?” Brogan asked.

“Hell yeah, our planet,” Wilton said.

“How’d you figure that?” Brogan said. “Pukes control Australia, Africa, Europe, and most of Asia. We’ve got the Americas.”

“We still got Antarctica,” Price said.

“Only ’cause they don’t want it. I figure we have less than forty percent of the Earth’s landmass. Which gives the Pukes over sixty percent. It seems to me that if this planet belongs to anyone now, it belongs to them.”

“Piss off,” Price said. “It was ours in the first place.”

“And after the white folk conquered the American Indians, who got to run the country and who got to live on reservations?” Brogan asked.

“You’re saying the Pukes are going to make us live on reservations?” Wilton asked.

“If we’re lucky,” Brogan said. “It’s just evolution, that’s all.”

“What are you talking about?” Wilton asked. “How is it evolution?”

“We used to be just a bunch of flea-bitten monkeys living in trees and scratching around in the dirt like all the other animals,” Brogan said. “We weren’t very big or strong, but we got smart, and soon we were the top of the food chain. Top of the pecking order. But not anymore. Now there’s someone else at the top of the food chain, and we don’t like it.”

“Guys,” Chisnall said. “You need to—”

The first burst of gunfire must have been well above their heads, but the whistle of bullets in the air sounded as though they were right by their ears.

“Contact front!” Price yelled.

Chisnall’s instincts took over. His combat visor was down, his coil-gun in his hands, before he had even formed a conscious thought. He rolled to the right, seeking cover behind a boulder. He scanned the desert ahead of his position, looking for movement.

“Muzzle flashes, one o’clock,” Brogan yelled.

There shouldn’t have been muzzle flashes. The magnetically powered coil-guns did not flash like human weapons, and alien gunfire did not sound like the explosions of cordite; the rounds broke the sound barrier on their way out of the barrel. This gunfire sounded and looked like an assault rifle. A human weapon.

The others had also dived for rocks or scrub, whatever they could find. Chisnall stuck his head above the rock for a second to try and spot their position and was rewarded with another burst of fire. Chips of rock exploded from the top of the boulder right in front of him. From the sound of the firing and the way the rock fragments had flown, he had a pretty good idea of the location of the shooters. He shucked his backpack off his shoulders.

“Covering fire,” he yelled into the comm, and immediately was encased in a cocoon of sound as his team responded with a hail of shots. They were firing wildly, but the targets didn’t know that, so it should keep their heads down for a moment.

Chisnall rolled sideways out from the cover of the rock and onto his feet in one fluid motion, sprinting to a sloping rocky shelf a few feet away. He reached it just as return gunfire rang out from the other side, and bullets zizzed through the air around him.

“Anyone got eyes on them?” he said softly into the comm.

Brogan replied immediately. “Cluster of boulders at the base of the hill.”

“How many guns?” Chisnall asked, training the night-sight of his weapon on that location. Here, behind the rocky shelf, he had a good field of fire without exposing himself to the shooters. He caught a slight movement, a vague dark shape behind the boulders.

“Only one, maybe two,” Brogan said.

“Strange,” Chisnall said. “It’s not big enough for a patrol.”

“Why the hell are they using MP5s?” Brogan asked.


[0110 hours]

[Perimeter Fence, Uluru Military Base, New Bzadia]

Kezalu stopped singing.

Yozi glanced up at him. They had been scouting the perimeter fence for two hours and Kezalu had been singing for most of it. Yozi wasn’t sure if Kezalu even realized he was doing it. He had a fine, clear, young voice, and the others in his squad had long since learned to tune it out.

Kezalu was on the fifty-caliber machine gun, mounted high on the Australian Army Land Rover. It was one of the few human weapons they actually used. Most Earth weapons were so primitive, heavy, and underpowered that they were not worth bothering with. But the big fifty-cal, although huge and unwieldy, fired such large projectiles that they could punch through body armor, vehicles, even buildings. And the weight of the weapon was not an issue if it was rack-mounted on top of a vehicle.

The Land Rovers were primitive, internal-combustion vehicles, and nobody much liked them. They had appropriated hundreds of them from the Australian Army when they had sent it running, however, and they were well suited to the rough desert terrain.

Kezalu had been singing a song from his homeland, the kind of song that only a young, innocent soldier, straight out of basic training, would sing. In some squads it would be seen as a sign of weakness, and the other soldiers would have beaten it out of him after the first day. But Yozi did not hold with that, and the members of his squad knew it, so they left Kezalu alone.

But Kezalu had stopped singing. He cocked his head to one side, as if listening.

“Stop the engine,” Yozi murmured to Zabet, the driver.

She complied immediately, flicking the Land Rover into neutral and letting it coast slowly to a halt. Yozi twisted around in the oversized (human-sized) chair and signaled Alizza in the Land Rover behind them to do the same.

Kezalu took off his helmet, listening. This time, without the rumble of the noisy engine, Yozi heard it too. They all did.

The sound of gunfire. The short popping sound of coil-guns answered by the hard cracking noise of a machine gun.

A human weapon.

Yozi aimed a flat hand in the direction he thought it was coming from and looked up at Kezalu. Kezalu shook his head and aimed his own hand slightly to the left of Yozi’s.

“Call it in,” Yozi said.

Zabet nodded and reached for the comm.



Wilton was hammering away on his coil-gun, laying down a constant stream of fire that would use up his entire ammo supply in a few minutes if he didn’t slow down.

“Cease fire, cease fire,” Chisnall called, and the firing stopped.

Echoes of the noise seemed to be rebounding off the big rocky hillside in front of him, but he knew that was just his ears adjusting to the sudden silence of the desert.

There was a short burst from the boulders in front of them.

“MP5s, are you sure?” Chisnall asked.

“I’m sure.”

“Hey, scumbugzzz,” he called out in English, but in his best Bzadian accent. “Hey, scumbugzzz. Stop you shooting, yezzz.”

The voice that came back was unmistakably English.

“Lay your weapons on the ground and raise your hands above your heads. We have you surrounded.”

No, you don’t, Chisnall thought. Not with just one or two of you.

“I coming out, yezzz,” he called out, and then said quietly on the comm, “I don’t think they’re Pukes.”

“Careful, LT,” said Brogan in his ear. “It could be a trap.”

“Phantom, you know what to do,” Chisnall said.

He raised his weapon high above his head and stepped out from behind the rock.

There were no shots.

He walked forward, keeping the coil-gun above his head, then unclipped it from the holster spring and slowly laid it on the ground. He did the same for his sidearm and advanced toward the boulders, keeping his hands high.

“That’s close enough, thanks,” the voice called. “Now the other chaps.”

Chisnall dropped the accent. “Who the hell are you, soldier?”

“There’s a platoon of us,” the voice said.

“No, there isn’t,” Chisnall said. “There are two or three of you at the most, and if there was a platoon in this vicinity, I’d know about it.”

“Who are you?”

“Lieutenant Ryan Chisnall, Allied Combined Operations Group, Recon Battalion,” Chisnall said.

“You look like a Puke,” the voice said.

“I’m no more Puke than you are,” Chisnall said. “Good disguise, though, yezz?”

“Keep your hands on top of your head,” the voice said. “And come behind the boulders.”

Chisnall walked forward slowly, making no movements that might alarm the men. He stepped between two of the boulders.

There were just two of them, one injured. Both in their twenties or early thirties. Both in the uniform of the British Royal Air Force. They had just one weapon between them, an MP5. Brogan was right.

“Dammit, you really are a Puke,” the man said as Chisnall rounded the rocks. He aimed the gun at Chisnall’s face.

“No, I’m not,” Chisnall said. He flipped up his combat visor.

“You damn well look like one,” the man said. “Tell your men to lay their weapons on the ground and come over here.”

“They’re already here,” Chisnall said with an even smile.

“G’day, mate,” Price said from behind the men.

The man looked around at the gun next to his head. Price, the Kiwi Phantom, had used Chisnall’s approach as a cover to slither silently around behind them. Nobody had heard her—not even Chisnall, who knew what she was doing.

Chisnall reached forward and took the MP5 off the soldier, flipping the safety as the other Angels approached.

“Believe it or not, we are humans,” he said. “I’m from California.”

“Well, you look like Pukes.”

“Believe me, we ain’t happy about that either,” Wilton said.

“Who are you?” Chisnall asked.

“Pilot Officer Sean Fleming. This is Flight Lieutenant Theo Bennett, Royal Air Force, Sixty-First Squadron.”

The injured man nodded but did not speak.

“What’s your story?” Chisnall asked.

The team squatted down in a semicircle around the two men.

“We were part of the raid on Townsville. Got chased by the Pukes halfway across Australia. They winged us and we managed to eject, but the skipper landed on rocks, banged up his leg a bit. We’ve been evading ever since.”

“Any plans to get you out?” Brogan asked.

Fleming shook his head. “If we could get to the coast, maybe, but there’s not much chance of that with the skipper’s leg. How about you? What are you doing here?”

“That’s classified,” Chisnall said.

Fleming nodded. “I thought as much. Five kids dressed as Pukes in the heart of Puke land.”

Chisnall turned to Brogan. “I want to debrief these men on enemy activity in the area. Retrieve the backpacks and set up a perimeter. Full alert. Pukes may have heard the shooting.”

Chisnall waited until the others had vanished into the darkness of the desert, then shook Fleming’s hand warmly. He made sure his comm mike was off.

“The uniform looks good on you.” He grinned.

“I think so too,” Fleming said. “How’d I do?”

“Convincing. You almost had me fooled.”

“Good to see you again, kid,” Fleming said. He winced. “Sorry, I know you hate being called that.”

“Don’t worry about it. Good to see you too. But what the hell was all that shooting as we approached the RV?”

“There were supposed to be six of you,” Fleming said. “We thought you were a real patrol, and you were just about to walk over the top of us.”

“Just as well you SAS guys can’t hit the side of a barn at ten paces with a shotgun,” Chisnall said.

“If we’d been aiming at you, you would have known all about it,” Fleming said. “I fired high in case it was you.”

“You just about took my head off by that boulder,” Chisnall said.

“Only because you stuck it up at exactly the wrong time,” Fleming said.

“Where’s Hunter?” Bennett asked, speaking for the first time. He was clearly in pain.

“He’s dead. Snakebite,” Chisnall answered.

“The desert is a dangerous place,” Bennett said.

“Yeah, and not just the wildlife,” Chisnall said.

Bennett looked closely at him. “It wasn’t an accident?”

“I doubt it.” Chisnall told them about the laser comm unit and the half-pipe.

“Any idea who did it?” Bennett’s voice was low and dangerous.

“None,” Chisnall said. “And it was done under cover of a sandstorm so the satellites wouldn’t see.”

“Tricky,” Fleming said.

“Are you still go for the mission, with the leg?”

“It’s not as bad as it looks, Lieutenant. I’ll be okay. Besides, it’ll add authenticity,” Bennett said.

“No problems avoiding the Pukes?” Chisnall asked.

“They know we’re here, somewhere,” Fleming said. “They’ve been looking high and low.”

“Yeah, we saw a lot of search activity,” Chisnall said.

“They haven’t found us yet.” Fleming grinned.

“Good,” Chisnall said. “What time are the fireworks?”

“I’ll call it in now,” Fleming said. He opened a small satchel and took out a laser comm unit, identical to the one Hunter had carried. “The carrier group is already in position.”

“Any danger to us?” Chisnall asked.

Bennett shook his head. “We’re well outside the fire zone.”

“Okay. After you’ve called it in, bury the laser comm. Don’t let my guys see it.”

Bennett nodded. “We won’t be needing it again.”

“LT.” It was Price’s voice on the comm.

“Copy,” Chisnall said, turning his comm mike back on.

“I think we’ve got company. A slow mover just broke off from the activity up around Uluru. Heading this way. Someone must have heard the shooting.”

Chisnall looked to the north. There was nothing visible in the sky.

“How long have we got?” he asked.

“Maybe ten mikes, if we’re lucky.”

“Copy that. Brogan, get the team up the hill. Cover all approaches. Camo down, and no movement unless I give the word.”

He didn’t say it out loud, but the success of the mission depended on them not getting spotted. For a few more hours at least.

“Clear copy, LT,” Brogan said.

“Will you be okay getting up there?” Chisnall asked Bennett.

The hill was steep, although there was a more gradual slope on the northern face.

“I’ll be fine, but I think it’s a bad idea,” Bennett said.

Chisnall glanced around. “There’s nowhere else that’s defendable. The hill would give us height advantage and good fields of fire if they do find us.”

Bennett shook his head. “Too exposed. A couple of mortar rounds and we’d be dingo food. Just tell your team to spread out and camo down.”

“Sir, no, sir.”

“You realize you are talking to a colonel.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I was running combat operations against the Pukes when you were still a twinkle in your daddy’s eye.”

“That’s probably not true, sir. And I have mission command.”

Fleming said, “The kid has good instincts, Colonel. And we don’t have time to argue.”

Bennett said, “Okay, looks like you’re in charge, Lieutenant.”

Chisnall nodded. He hoped he wasn’t making another huge mistake.