Invasion

Chapter Two

“So, there’s nothing you can tell me?”

Joshua Vote Bourjaily liked to think of himself as an ace reporter, a combination of Woodward and Bernstein, but the truth was that he was just a muckraker. He painted himself as having access to hundreds of sources within the military, but when pressed, even he had to admit that his sources weren’t high-ranking officials, but dissatisfied juniors who had a grudge against the military. It made for a handful of interesting scoops, but mostly… he just picked up rubbish.

“No,” Sergeant Ellsworth said. She’d been passed over for promotion at least twice, according to her, because someone else in her platoon had been sucking off the entire promotion board. Having met her in person — Joshua had learnt, quickly, that meeting sources in person was the only way to gauge their reliability — he suspected that the truth was that she was actually incompetent. “All I know is that we’ve been ordered to report to the barracks in a few days for possible deployment.”

She put the phone down; Joshua heard it click as he sat back in his tatted old armchair. He liked to think of his office as a headquarters, perhaps with a bodyguard and a sexy young secretary, but it was really a converted flat in the low-rent district of Austin City, Texas. A handful of filing cabinets, a pair of old computers — so old that they ran Windows 95 — and a single modern laptop took up most of the space; it had been months since anyone else had entered the office, or even the flat. It was cheaper than hiring a proper office… and it wasn’t as if he had any chance of gaining a proper position with a regular respectable newspaper. His blog might have a handful of devoted fans, but his reputation kept most major producers from even considering him as a source, let alone a regular employee. The newspaper industry was not a forgiving one and someone who had been discredited so comprehensively didn’t have a hope of employment. The fact that some reporters actually survived such an experience only added to Joshua’s hatred of the world. They got away with it because they were politically impossible to fire.

He didn’t see the notes in front of him for a long moment. He was too busy remembering. He’d been so certain of his source, so convinced that the source was telling the truth… and he’d impressed his editor enough to write the article. He should have known better; for three days, he’d been a hero… and then he’d become a laughing stock. The story of torture and rape committed by American soldiers had been detailed; too detailed. It had been easy to prove that the unit in question not only didn’t have any soldiers with the right names, but hadn’t been anywhere near Iraq — ever. Joshua’s memories of the next few days had become hazy, probably because he didn’t want to remember, but now… now he was a freelance reporter whom no one in authority would even consider using. All he could do was pick up titbits and try to pass them onwards.

The notes taunted him as he picked them up and read through them again. Joshua had realised, much to his own private surprise, that more soldiers, sailors and airmen were being recalled to duty than could reasonably be expected, even through there was a war on. His opinion of the military had never been high, even before he’d been used to smear every reporter in the United States, but even he had to concede that there was little reason for them to suddenly call up everyone in Texas. It was possible, of course, that it was just a drill, but Joshua knew that he would have heard rumours about it long before it began… and he hadn’t heard anything. It was as if the United States was, very quietly, preparing for war.

He’d wracked his brains trying to understand the reason why, but he’d come up with nothing. Normally, there would be storm clouds on the horizon, some kind of threat to America or American interests in the world, but there was nothing. Iran was behaving itself, Iraq had been quietening down for years, Russia was concentrating on consolidating it’s gains over the last few years… hell, there hadn’t even been an annual confrontation with China. It was possible that the country was actually on the verge of war, but he knew enough about the political game to know that it would have been leaked by now, by a politician eager to play the political game. The President would need to build up support for any policy… and he hadn’t been releasing warning notes, or insider briefings, or anything.

He looked back down at the notes again. He was careful never to store anything on computers these days; his enemies wouldn’t hesitate to hack into them to remove the data. Paper was inconvenient, but it had the advantage of being secure, unless someone actually broke into his office. He’d traced movements that didn’t quite add up. Additional Patriot batteries had been deployed around the region. Various USAF asserts had been placed on standby. Aircraft at USAF bases and Air National Guard bases were being armed with live weapons. That wasn’t so unusual in the days after 9/11, where everyone knew that one day they might have to shoot down a hijacked airliner before it became a weapon, but there were a lot of them. Army, navy and air force personnel activated suddenly and whisked off into the unknown. The entire country was gearing up for war… and he didn’t even have the slightest idea of who they intended to fight!

There was no choice, he decided. He would have to call Daniel Holloway.

He listened as the phone rang slowly. Holloway was the pearl in his collection of contacts, a Captain in the USAF who was dissatisfied… without any apparent reason to be dissatisfied. That bothered Joshua more than he cared to admit. Normally, he found a source who had a clear motive to want to talk outside of school… but Holloway had never talked about why he wanted to share what he knew. That made him unreliable, in Joshua’s view, but as the highest-ranking person he knew, there was little choice, but to listen, at least, to what he was saying.

“Holloway,” a voice drawled, finally. “What can I do for you?”

“Daniel,” Joshua said. He knew that his voice would be recognised at once. Holloway swore blind that the phones in the base weren’t tapped, but it was his career on the line if he was wrong; Joshua trusted that self-interest, if nothing else, would keep him honest and discreet. “I wonder…”

“Damn you,” Holloway snapped. His normal drawl had almost vanished, replaced by… fear? “You shouldn’t be calling me here?”

For a moment, surprise almost brought Joshua’s heart to a stop. “Daniel, I…”

“Shut up,” Holloway thundered. Anger had rapidly replaced fear. “Fuck off! Never call on me again!”

He slammed the phone down before Joshua could say another word.

“What the fuck?” Joshua asked, finally. He’d sometimes had a source vanish on him, but he’d never been told to fuck off, not in such a manner. Some of his sources had realised just how little influence he actually had and abandoned him, but even they had been polite, but Holloway… Holloway had been scared out of his skin. He’d been scared enough to tell Joshua to get lost and had put the phone down. Someone had put the fear of God into him… which meant that something serious had to be going on… but what?

He spent the next hour making a series of other phone calls. It was depressing how few of his sources he could actually contact… and two of them, like Holloway, told him never to try to call them again, before hanging up on him. His research told him that there was something serious going on, but what? It seemed a riddle he couldn’t even begin to crack. His sources in the State Police, such as they were, seemed to think that they’d all been placed on alert as well… and warned that there might be riots, if not outright civil unrest. How did all of it add together?

“Damn them,” he muttered finally, and started to compose a story with what little he did know. He wasn’t supposed to know, but a few dozen stringers from major newspapers read his blog regularly… and they’d have much better sources. Whatever the military was trying to cover up, they’d uncover it… and reveal just what they were trying to keep hidden. If reporters existed to keep the government honest, Joshua was determined that they would find out what was wrong, or die trying.

Maybe it’s a military coup, he thought, and on that note, went to sleep in his armchair.

From the outside, the building looked like a normal office block, owned by a company called International Developments, Inc. Visitors who entered, after passing through a security system that rivalled anything else used in a civilian building, found their way blocked by an attractive secretary, who informed them that the building was merely an office and gave them contact details for the higher-ups in Virginia. More inquisitive people, or job-hunters, were given addresses to visit, the latter warned, however, that recruiting was not underway, at least not at the present time. Even if a persistent visitor entered the main building, they would not be able to use the elevator or the stairs, not without passing through a biometric reader that guarded the doors. The company kept its secrets… and, as anyone could discover, had a long history of being trustworthy, partly because of the extensive security measures.

The man who strode in through the front doors looked like a casual visitor, at first, until he stepped up to the inner doors and pushed his hand against the reader. There was a brief pause, and then the doors unlocked, allowing him entry to the remainder of the ground floor. He marched through the corridor to the elevator, waited for it to open, and then stepped inside, pressing his hand against a second reader as soon as the door hissed closed. It was a nasty little trap, in its way; anyone who attempted to use the lift, without clearance, would find themselves trapped inside the cubicle. The newcomer waited for the lift to reach the fifth floor and stepped out as soon as it opened. Here, the trappings of a normal office block were cast away, revealing the heart of one of the foremost covert operations units in America. The men and women in the office might not wear uniforms, but there was no disguising their military bearing.

Captain Brent Roeder stepped into the briefing room and caught the Colonel’s eye. The Colonel had commanded SF34 for the past two years, although — unlike Brent himself — he hadn’t actually been on a mission for a while. The SF unit only accepted experienced officers, those who had seen the elephant and knew that there were times for breaking rules, but someone so senior could hardly be risked in Iraq, Afghanistan and a number of places where everyone would be surprised to learn that American soldiers had served. A month ago, Brent had been in Northern Pakistan, hunting the Taliban and the terrorist leadership hiding somewhere within the badlands. The recall to duty, two weeks ahead of his planned return time, had been a surprise.

“Now we’re all here, we can begin,” the Colonel said. Informality was the order of the day in SF34. The Colonel wouldn’t put up with any horseplay or the jokes that idle soldiers would sometimes play on each other, but he would allow a level of free discussion that would have been out of place in most units. “There has been a surprising development and we have been placed on alert to cope with it.”

Brent found himself leaning forward eagerly and pulled himself back. The grapevine had been suggesting, for the past week or so, that the Iranians had finally been caught with their fingers in the till… or, rather, accepting money from terrorists to host bases in their territory, safe from conventional attack. Brent and the remainder of SF34 represented a more serious — and unconventional — response to their actions. It wouldn’t be the first time that they had raided a friendly country, or at least a country that they were not officially at war with, aiming to burn out the terrorists.

The Colonel’s next words shocked hell out of him. “NASA has detected an alien starship heading for Earth,” he said, shortly. “I have been given a classified brief — an extremely classified brief — that we are going to be going on full alert for their arrival. God alone knows how the world will change — hell, God alone knows if they are hostile or not — but if there is an invasion on the way, we’re going to be ready.”

Brent stared at him. He’d been told, months ago, that they would be conducting a secret mission in Germany… and he’d taken that calmly. He’d hiked over Saudi Arabia in local clothing and he’d taken that in his stride, but… aliens? Cold suspicion flared through his mind; it wasn’t unknown for the Special Forces to be tested to see how far they would go, a procedure intended to guard against the possibility of a rogue unit blindly following orders that ended with the assassination of the President or something along the same lines. Aliens were a little unusual for such a test run, but maybe…

One of the other officers put it into words. “Sir… aliens?”

“I’m afraid so,” the Colonel said. “This isn’t a drill. Ideally, you won’t have anything to do and all of these are just precautions, but if you have to act as stay-behind units, you’re going to find yourselves in the rear lines.”

There were some nervous chuckles. SF34 had been tasked as a stay-behind unit, but it had been generally accepted that they wouldn’t be staying behind in their own country; after all, America was generally impregnable. The war-gamers came up with endless contingency plans, but barring a Mexican invasion or a major civil upheaval, no one seriously expected to be operating behind enemy lines, on American soil. The closest any of them had come to such operations had been special — and highly classified — operations in Iraq. Aliens, on the other hand, might actually be able to invade America directly, something that no nation possessed the power to do.

“Hopefully,” the Colonel continued, once he had fielded a handful more questions, “you won’t have anything to do. However, you will spend the rest of this week working on covert operations procedures in the event of America falling under enemy attack.”

“Madness,” Brent said, shaking his head. “Are you sure it’s not a drill?”

Another soldier had a different question. “When is the President going to tell the nation?”

“We suspect in a few days at most,” the Colonel said. “We want to get as many of the preparations completed, out of the public eye, as possible before it hits the news channels. Once it does, there is going to be a panic, and when that happens…”

He didn’t bother to elaborate. “I’ll hold individual conferences with you over the next few days to sort out final preparations,” he concluded. “If nothing else, this will make for a particularly interesting exercise.”

“The shit’s about to hit the fan,” Deborah Ivey said, cheerfully, as she swept into the Oval Office. “We’ve had calls from a dozen major media outlets and other such bastards demanding to know just what the fuck is going on. I think we’re going to have to come clean about the aliens, chief.”

The President eyed her balefully. Deborah’s ability to swear like a drunken trooper never creased to irritate him. Days spent arguing with various world leaders about disclosure, let alone a united front to confront the aliens, hadn’t done anything for his mood. The Europeans and the Japanese wanted to move to informing the public, while the Chinese and the Russians wanted to keep it to themselves, for the moment. The NSA had informed the President, covertly, that the Chinese in particular were working overtime to block out the news, even to the point of restricting the Internet use rights of foreign-owned companies. He was morbidly certain that the Chinese, and probably everyone else as well, were already trying to communicate with the aliens.

“I see,” he said, finally. Deborah’s intelligence was both an asset and a curse. “How much do they know?”

“They’re pretty much figured out that we’ve calling a covert mobilisation… and that most of the other world governments are doing the same,” Deborah informed him. “No one has actually dropped the A-word yet, but ten gets you twenty that the thought has crossed their minds… and they might even be considering using it in public.”

The President smiled thinly. “How long do you think we have?”

“A day, at most, before it leaks out,” Deborah said. “It’s probably going to leak out from Europe — their security is pretty much crap — but as we brief more and more of our own people, we increase the likelihood of a leak from our side as well. If one of the national governments goes public…”

The President nodded. “Contact the Press Office, then,” he said. “Tell them that I want to reserve a slot on all of the national networks — normal conditions — for this evening. Get in touch with the various Governors and tell them that we’re going public, so they have to put their people on alert for any panic, and then tell Tom that he is to inform the other governments…”

Deborah frowned. “You really think that there’ll be a panic?”

“I don’t know,” the President said. “Young James couldn’t give me any real production, but as far as I am concerned? We’re in uncertain — uncharted — waters… and God alone knows what’s going to happen when we drop this little bombshell on the world.”