Bear Surgery
Trooper Daniel "Hotfoot" Maclane could hardly see the
jumpmaster in the blacked-out interior of the C-141. He could hear the man
alright though. The burly aircrewman stomped his foot on the steel decking of
the huge plane as he stood up.
"Get ready!"
The rest of the mixed bag of SAS, Delta Force and SEAL troopers slid to
the edge of their folded metal seats, tightening straps and making final checks
on weapons. The latter ranged from 'Room broom' MP5K submachine guns firing 9mm
Parabellum to heavy 23-pound Haskins rifles with ten-power scopes capable of
spitting out massive HE/incendiary rounds, each with the ability to blow a man
in half.
The red light flashed,
and the jumpmaster bellowed.
"Stand up!"
Men rose to their feet, each one encumbered by weapons, demo and body
armour. Maclane pushed himself up as well, making sure that his MP5 was
securely fastened to his pack.
The rear ramp went
down and the howling of the wind increased. The jump would be HALO, High
Altitude Low Opening, were each man would plummet in a free fall and pull his
ripcord at two and a half thousand feet. Maclane forced his mind to be calm as
the men readied for the jump.
The war had been going badly on the US west Coast, heavy Soviet tanks
having hammered the living crap out of several understrength Home Guard
divisions. Trying to stem to flow, an unknown staff officer had suggested a
surgical strike on the bear's Eastern flank. However, any attempt to land on
the Soviet shore would have to do so under the looming threat of a Soviet
nuclear missile complex in the Ural mountains. That was why the three C-141's
had been filled with some of the best-trained troops the Alliance had to
offer... a total of some three hundred crack commandos skilled in close-range
assault, demolitions, sniping, and a host of other skills.
Their mission : To take out the soviet missile base.
The green light came on... and the men rushed out, hurling themselves
into the void. Far below, Maclane could see the Soviet base, the massive shapes
of the missile silos towering over the barracks, SAM's, guns and power plants.
The planes had turned back, but AA was still coming up and bursting in
the sky. Several shells exploded among the men, killing a few and leaving
others mortally wounded and incapacitated. The others came down, invisible
against the dark sky and too small to be detected by radar.
Maclane yanked on the ripcord, and his chute of black special-ops silk
bloomed. Around him, others were also gliding earthwards, silent angels of
doom.
All would have been rosy had it not been for the idea of some
overexcited conscript down below. The planes were long gone, and his flare
never got high enough to illuminate them even if they had been still flying
right over the base. However, the bright light had the immediate effect of
throwing the paratroopers into stark relief.
Maclane saw his life pass in front of his eyes in those few seconds of
amazing silence... the conscripts below obviously caught off-guard by the
sudden appearance of three hundred black-clad parachutists over their base.
Then all hell broke loose.
Fire from dozens of guns streaked skywards, the air literally whizzing
with bullets. Maclane grunted as a Russian 7.62mm round struck at an acute
angle and was deflected by his chest armour. The same round cut the tether line
attaching him to his equipment bundle, and Maclane could do nothing as his pack
and weapon fell earthwards, leaving him with only a .45 pistol. Other men were
not as lucky, some literally disintegrating to flak cannon hits and others
punctured by hot lead to die screaming in the harness.
The ground rushed up, and Maclane hit it hard in a PLF, Parachute
Landing Fall. The ground around him was being kicked up by flying lead, and
Maclane struck the quick release on his chute, struggling clear of the
billowing silk and whipping out his .45.
At that moment, a searchlight mounted on the perimeter of the base
starting strobing the area around him. Maclane leapt to his feet and forced
himself to run, knowing that the black silk that had camouflaged him against
the sky was now a liability as it lay on the white snow.
Men around him were being chopped down by gunfire. Maclane nearly ran
into range of an automated gun himself. The twin-barrelled Vulcan weapon spun
to face him, just as another trooper dropped neatly behind it. The gun
hesitated and went after the second man instead, sawing him into two and
sending both his legs cartwheeling lazily into the sky.
Maclane spun round and raced the other way, towards a russian barracks.
Conscripts were pouring out, dazed and still half-asleep as officers tried to
get them into a resemblance of fighting order. Maclane cursed his lack of an
automatic weapon viciously... the soviets were bunching up in front of the
barracks, making a perfect target. Several of the soldiers were firing at
random into the air, hoping to hit the Allied paratroops.
At that moment however, a russian searchlight operator had his assistant
killed messily in front of him. In his fear, he spun the searchlight at the
closest group of muzzle flashes he could see, illuminating the russian
conscripts in front of the barracks for a moment.
That was all the time the elite Allied commandos needed to acquire the
new targets. Fire from all directions converged and punched through the men,
bowling them over in seconds. Another SAS burst, like the punctuation mark of a
long sentence, took the face of the searchlight operator on a one-way trip to
the searchlight tower's wall. The searchlight itself was taken out, shattered
under the impact of a huge Haskins slug.
The commandos were now in their element. Running flat out with the
endurance and speed of top atheletes, they took out stunned russians on the
move, leaving behind a trail of contorted corpses, some of them still in their
nightclothes, as they split up for the objectives.
The main door of the radar center exploded inwards, the huge armoured
pieces flying inwards under the overpressure of planted shaped charges.
Commandos rushed in, taking down the communications personnel 'on the fly',
killing most with accurate shots to the cranium. Most of the latter were
unarmed, but they were still wearing uniform.
The allied troopers gave no quarter, having seen the after-action
reports on the SPETS attack of New York. The soviet commandos had attacked a
weapons factory and fled into a hospital when armour had arrived to engage
them. They had been taken on by allied commando teams in merciless room to room
fighting, the floors awash with the blood and offal of soldiers and civilians
and the air thick with the oaths and moans of the dying. In their final act of
defiance, the remainder had retreated behind human hostages and detonated the
plastique charges that they had hastily planted on the foundations of the
building. Hundreds of patients and medical staff, together with the remaining
SPETS and many allied troopers, were killed in the explosion and subsequent
collapse of the building.
The communications went down within minutes, plastique charges having
blown off the antennas on the roof of the building. Groups of commandos had
taken positions in the base and were pouring a hail of fire into the barracks,
pinning down the rest of the base guards. Maclane paused for a moment to pull
an AK and several magazines from the bodies of two soviets who had run from a
sidedoor in one of the missile silos. Both had been killed by double-taps in
the head, Maclane having aimed under the rim of their steel helmets at the
leather facemask that most of the conscripts wore to ward off the cold. There
was sound behind him and he spun, AK up and readied.
The two men rushing towards him were not Russians... rather, they were
'Sparky' Hayes, an SAS electronics expert, and 'Doomsday', one of the most
proficient demomen in the SAS.
Sparky grinned and pointed at the door
"Let's pay Ivan a house call!"
The three of them went down the stairs that the russians had come up
from, MP5's raised and ready. They came to a locked hatchway, Doomsday
immediately unslinging his pack and rigging up a breaching charge.
"Fire in the hole!" Doomsday called as he ran back to the two
to shelter in the stairway. The men released the chin straps on their helmets,
jamming the pots down hard on their heads and clasping their hands over their
ears, mouths open and eyes shut.
The concussion of the explosion under their helmets could cause the pots
to 'lift-off'... if the straps were fastened, the result would be a nasty
broken jaw.
The charge blew the door wide open, revealing a long corridor that lead
down straight to the launch center of the silo. The Soviets had rigged up
cameras and sentry guns to watch the corridor, deeming them more reliable than
human sentries. However, they were now useless, having been hamstrung by the
destruction of the tesla generators south of the base by Delta men. Likewise,
the fearsome Tesla coils were now hapless ornamental Christmas trees that
watched the carnage in the snowscape around them silently.
The men stopped at the
entrance to the launch center.
Both Doomsday and Maclane were better-trained as room-clearers than
Sparky, so they would go in first. However, the door was wide enough only for
one. They were fast friends, close as brothers in the elite cadre that was the
SAS. Doomsday solemnly produced his "Lucky" coin and flipped it...
the two friends old way of deciding who would get the nastier job. Doomsday
always took Heads, Maclane took tails. Both had jealously guarded coins that
each deemed lucky for him.
Maclane lost.
He readied himself as Sparky prepared to pull the plug on the detonator
key that Doomsday had passed to him. Doomsday would follow right behind
Maclane.
There was not much resistance... Only one soviet launch officer was
armed and he promptly threw down his pistol when faced with the three armoured
special forces troops. The men around him raised their hands in surrender upon
seeing their leader give up.
Sparky set to work, overiding the safety devices as he disarmed the
devices. A quick modification to the launching software set the nukes to launch
in 5 minutes... with the silo doors still locked. The missile would simply
demolish itself in the impact... the disarmed nuclear warhead smashed into
useless junk by the collision and consumed by the ensuing rocket-fuel fire.
With the shaft jammed with fire and missile wreckage, the silo would be rendered
useless.
The men left the launch center with the launch officers locked in their
mess hall. They could not shoot them... that was one of the fundamental
differences between the two forces : The Allies did not shoot men who had
surrendered.
Upon reaching the surface however, Maclane received bad news over the
radio.
"Calling all Crockett units... This is Overwatch. We are under
attack. Heavy soviet armour is attempting to break into the base."
Overwatch consisted of mainly SAS snipers... they simply didn't have the
equipment to deal with the soviet Rhino tanks now attempting to roll up the
mountain road into the embattled base. The Crockett units, namely the ones
doing the actual assault on the base, were in danger of being caught by soviet
armour and losing their LZ, Landing Zone.
If the Rhinos broke through, the Blackhawks would not be able to extract
the men.
"This is Overwatch..." The voice sounded out of breath,
"We're pulling back... heavy casualties, half of us are down... the CO has
been hit in the head... We can't hold them off much longer!"
A new voice broke over the radio.
"This is Phantom Five Zero. We have them on radar."
High above the embattled Overwatch units, Harrier jets shrieked down,
releasing a hail of Maverick anti-armour missiles. The first three Rhinos
slewed out of the formation, armour plates torn off their flanks by internal
explosions as HEAT jets from the Maverick warheads blowtorched through their
weaker top armour, setting off their ammunition and fuel, immolating the crews
alive.
The Bear struck back, Flak trucks unleashing a torrent of shrapnel into
the air, sending hot metal into the lead Harrier. It exploded in a fiery
supernova, flinging blazing fuel and torn metal earthwards.
A sudden sound startled Maclane. It was terribly familiar, yet the
source remained elusive from him until he looked straight up.
There was a Tesla Coil behind... and it was powering up.
"Run!" Maclane shouted as he leapt to his feet, knowing that
even elite commandos were not immune to Russia's best defence system.
The two other commandos sprinted for cover... but a crackling arc of
man-made lightning caught poor Sparky in the back. He gave a short howl in the
instant before the outlashing of electrical energy turned him into a human
firecracker.
Maclane, shaking with shock and anger, stared at the scorched patch
where Sparky used to be... there was nothing left of him... which was to be
expected by a weapon that turned Grizzly tanks into molten slag heaps in
seconds.
There were other shouts and expletives on the net as commandos were
suddenly put under fire from automated guns and Tesla coils. An urgent voice
broke through the radio.
"This is Eagle One! All Crockett units! The soviets have a back-up
nuclear powerplant south of the base! A soviet Iron Curtain defence system has
also been detected! You are ordered to take out all anti-aircraft defences at
once!"
Maclane was startled... Eagle One was General Thorn himself. The fact
that he had taken command personally showed the seriousness of the situation. If
the commandos did not do something soon... they were going to receive one hell
of a bear-hug from the Iron-curtained Rhinos.
The commandos swung into action, risking all to take out the Flak
cannons that were now active and hammering the retreating Harriers, which had
been reduced to 6 of the original dozen jets. The men paid a terrible price...
for most of the Flak cannons had been sited to receive the most protection from
Teslas and sentry guns. But one by one, the Flak cannons started to fall
silent.
Maclane and Doomsday took cover from a sentry gun beside the burning
ruins of a knocked-out Flak Cannon. The little robotic bastard of a gun had
been sited well, and the last three Flak Cannons were sitting pretty and safe
behind it.
Maclane and Doomsday looked at each other... the Rhinos were already at
the front door and General Thorn had commenced a count-down on the radio to
Iron Curtain activation.
Doomsday produced his coin and flipped it. It was heads.
"I win, so you follow my plan. I distract the gun while you go and
take it out."
Maclane started to protest, knowing that Doomsday was putting himself in
great risk.
But Doomsday was firm.
"Coin says it. No arguing. Now move!"
The demoman sprinted off towards the right, the sentry tracking him with
a erupting wall of shells. Maclane cussed loudly and ran as fast as he could to
get behind the gun.
He was there in seconds, but they felt like years to him, hearing the
savage tearing of the twin-barrelled gun as he ran closer to it, expecting it
to swivel around and smear him in a heart-stopping instant.
He yanked two grenades from his belt order and jammed them under the
flexible ammunition feed belts, diving behind a Flak cannon for cover.
The twin explosions cut off the ammo chain, and the gunfire stopped, the
barrels whirring and the gun still active. The sentry spun around to track him,
the multiple barrels spinning. However, without ammo it was as good as dead.
Maclane tried to spot Doomsday, but the man had disappeared. He swiftly
took care of the remaining Flak cannons and radioed General Thorn.
Like the angels of salvation came the FA-18 Hornets from the carriers
that were now off the western coast. Just as the first Rhino rumbled into
sight, swinging its massive barrel to face Maclane, a sudden streak of light
came down on it like a thunderbolt from the heavens. The tank exploded from the
impact of the Maverick, the massive turret spinning off the huge tank as its
ammo cooked off.
The other tanks and
Flak trucks were rapidly demolished, drowned under a flail of streaking missile
fire. Metal hulks slewed and slowed to a halt while others simply disintegrated
into multiple eruptions of fire and debris. A sudden glare of green lightning
to the south told of the destruction of the soviet nuclear plant.
Above it all, the steady drone of hundreds of Blackhawk helicopters
provided a counterpoint to the explosions... The Marines were coming in. It was
no longer a simple extraction of special forces... General Thorn was sending in
ground troops to take over the Russian base and establish Allied presence on
Soviet soil.
Maclane watched the explosions in awe for a while... before proceeding
to look for Doomsday.
They loaded them on the same Blackhawk. Doomsday had been hit in the leg
and would be going home for treatment. Maclane noticed him clutching something
in his left hand.
"What's that?" he asked.
Doomsday gave him a wry look, trying to smile despite the pain.
"Well, since I won't be doing any fighting for a while... Look at
it."
Maclane took it... it was Doomsday's lucky coin. It had heads on both
sides.
"You bastard!" Maclane said as he pulled something from his
pocket.
It was another coin... ordinary in all aspects except one.
Both its faces showed tails.
Doomsday grinned
"Who Dares, Wins..." He managed to utter before morphine
asserted its irresistable control.
Note : Sorry for the
spelling errors! It was a rush job, done on impulse... so forgive me if it
ain't good! :)
PS : "Who Dares,
Wins" is the motto of the SAS, I think.
