10:32 A.M Siberian Time
Beach Head personally had always hated being a civilian. He didn't like people as a rule butting their noses into his business, he didn't like people who were obnoxious that he couldn't kick the butt of, and there was absolutely nothing glamourous about wearing a damn tie and suit to punch numbers on a machine nine to five. He was glad to be in the Army again and this time it was going to be for life, no matter what his mother thought about it.
"Those damn Snakes knew we were coming!" Beach Head shouted at the top of his lungs. The G.I. Joe Angel-7 Stealth fighters that were their escort across the most deserted piece of tundra in Siberia were getting their asses blown out of them by Cobra's Phantom fighters. Every time the enemy fired they would appear for just a second then vanish again.
"Well Sir it's a bit late to be worrying about that now!" Demolition Derby shouted as weaved the Air Skimmer Troop Transport inbetween a pair of missles aimed at their engines.
"Well if you don't mind taking a woman's advice, we need to eject now," Icicle causally said as she blew a pink bubblegum bubble.
"I'll have none of that talk in my unit! This plane will be evacuated over my dead body!" Beach Head screamed as he waved his clenched fist toward the girl. She was trouble from the get go and reminded him of a more sarcastic version of Lady Jaye.
"You'd better be getting the coffin out then sir," Icicle pointed to the flames comming from their rear thrusters. They'd managed to catch a few vehicle blasts and that meant they couldn't go anywhere but down now. The Alaskan girl then started to suit up in her parachute right before Beach Head's flustered eyes.
"Sir I've got a mark on a potential landing spot for our evacuation. It'll be the perfect place to escape Cobra's assault!" Punch Card shouted as he looked up from his computer, adjusting the glasses that reminded Beach Head too much of the terrorist's drones.
"We're not going anywhere!" Beach Head grabbed the parachute off Icicle's back and then pulled out his pistol as he shot the control panel for the Air Skimmer in the cockpit.
"Are you out of your damn mind!" Infiltrator shouted even as the plane began moving forward to a crash landing.
"Our Father, who art in Heaven..." Last Chance began to say even as she braced herself in her seat.
"I know how much punishment this machine will take before it's on a one way ticket to Hell. If Demolition Derby is half as good as his reports say he is...and you better pray missy that he is...we should be fine. Plus Cobra wants us alive or we'd be dead already! I intend to make sure they wonder whether or not they failed in that respect!" Beach Head told them the plan he'd come up with in the first few minutes of this attack.
"That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my entire life!" Icicle screamed even as everyone braced for the impact as the plane was brought in low against the pine trees that exploded around the vehicle's descent.
Icicle didn't get to say much else before the plane shattered it's wings off and came to a screeching halt, pressed against the side of a snow bound hill. Surprisingly to every member of the team but Beach Head, they were all alive if a bit bruised.
"Ten hut! Everyone whose able to walk is getting out of here now!" Beach head shouted and shoot open the door locks to the plane's side.
"I think I wet my shorts," Punch Card said as he looked at the shattered monitor of his laptop.
"It'll keep you warm rookie. Harvest anything you can from the ship and get ready for Hell. We don't have much time to complete our mission and I'm not going home until we can transmit the coordinates of Cobra's rocket pad to G.I. Joe HQ!" Beach head shouted before Infiltrator pulled open the side of the doors.
"I knew I should have stayed in law," Last Chance muttered as she cut herself from the seat-belt.
***
8:45 PM
Washington D.C. was a glittering gem in the Nation's crown jewels but it was under martial law right now and the majority of the citizens had evacuated out of fear of a nuclear strike from Cobra's new super weapon. Under the guise of National Guardsmen G.I. Joe had regrouped and were currently using the empty Capital Hill building as their headquarters while a dummy G.I. Joe rode around on a armored train throughout the country.
"General Hawk, I don't like Beach Head and his team being used as decoys," Conrad Hauser said even as dozens of operatives worked feverishly at their consoles to try and decode Cobra's transmissions across the planet. Duke had just gotten off the phone with his wife and kids and the situation they described a the nation's mood was not at all comforting. Mass panic had settled in across America and there were no leaders in any position to reassure them that everything was going to turn out okay. Duke wasn't even sure that would be telling them the truth at this point either.
"I don't like it either Duke but these terrorists have been one step ahead of us since the game began. Flint's team is armed with our best operatives and the finest snow trained troops the country currently has to offer. I won't lie to you Duke that if our Siberia operation doesn't turn up results, we may have to start worrying more about damage control than actually winning the war," General Hawk said with a shake of his head before one of the officers brought him his coffee. With nothing to strike at, Hawk was enjoying himself lording over what he considered a useless bureaucracy in the military.
"You can't mean that Sir," Conrad said with a grit to his teeth. Duke had a strange relationship with General Hawk who was not only his commanding officer but his step-father. When Duke's father had died early on in Vietnam, just a few years before Duke went on to serve himself, then Captain Clayton Albernathy had gone on to court and marry Duke's mother and father his kid brother Falcon. Conrad had never let that interfere with their relationship though and though he had come to respect the man as a leader, he'd never been close to him as family.
"Several nations across Africa and the Middle East have already given their unconditional surrenders to Cobra operatives Duke. There is already reports from the C.I.A that intense fighting is going on in Russia and China between Pro-Cobra partisans and the loyalist military. The bean counters and inexperienced command left over from the attacks are already talking appeasing the new leadership rather than directly challenging them," General Hawk drank his coffee hard and shook his head clean of the cobwebs.
"You can't appease Cobra General Hawk, you know that," Conrad said, shaking his head. It wasn't the first time that Duke considered putting in a written to Hawk that they turn the United State's nuclear weapons supply into the sky. He'd already talked to a number of individuals about seeding the space like a mine-field to catch Cobra's cloaked space station full blast. The only problem with that was that he half suspected that was exactly what Cobra wanted and would simply put them in charge of a massive supply of weapons while their own machine inevitably ran down.
"No you can't and following their plan would make Hitler and Stalin look like men with pop guns given the amount of power they'd be turning over to the group. The Cold War would be just above room temperature in comparison," General Hawk had personally had to issue clandestein threats to a number of individuals to keep their mouth shut. He didn't like what this chaos was doing to him and he didn't like the feeling that a number of the people involved were almost eager to turn over the world to the fascist regime. One communication he'd let slip by was from the current leader in Germany whose parents were Nazi youth, he was already negiotiating for his country to turn on their allies for the past forty years against the Pro-Loyalist Baltics.
"Sir I've got something!" Mainframe said who had started work for AT&T and ended up going bankrupt with Dialtone before the NSA picked up his bills. Mainframe had changed the most in the decade since G.I. Joe. His love for Zarana had not apparently worked out very well and the two had parted terms on bad company, he'd eventually found himself involved with a very nice girl and had gotten a bit of a paunch from her cooking. Still he'd trained the finest crop of spies and number crunchers in the world.
"What is it?" Duke said, comming over as fast as he could, actually jumping over a few desks to do it.
"Just like General Hawk thought, there is a traitor in the G.I. Joe ranks. It was an almost undetectable transmission being conducted in the guise of radio broadcasts using a specific series of code words. The last one we've managed to catch and it confirms the traitor telling Cobra about the dummy train and the missions," Mainframe said as he put his hands through his slightly balding head.
"Any sign of the traitor's identity?" Duke asked as he looked at the information, it was thorough but disorganized.
"Not yet Sir," one of the rookies named Jack something said back.
"Perhaps we can turn this situation toward our advantage. Mainframe do we know enough about this code to send a fake broadcast of our own?" General Hawk said with a rather desperate but strong authority to his voice. He'd been working thirty-six hours straight and he was pretty much at his own wits end here.
"They're all based on ancient military commanders and Wizard of Oz references. I think I can figure it out enough to send a reasonable facimile but there's no guarentee it will work," Mainframe reluctantly admitted as he stuffed his hands in his pocket.
"Do it anyway. If we can do this properly we might be able to lure Cobra into a trap that will finish it off once and for all," General Hawk said, popping a cigarette into his mouth.
"And if it doesn't work General?" Duke said, expecting the answer.
"Every last man I send to do the job is likely to end up dead," General Hawk made no bones about the truth of the mission's danger.
***
"So long! Farewell! Alveterzay! Goodbye!" Quick Kick said with a smile as the Russian Farmer dropped Team C off at the end of the road in Siberia, literally. Team C was the actual strike team with the mission of knocking out Cobra Commander's secret facility. Personally Quick Kick had the idea that if Cobra could afford a gigantic rocket pad, a device that could hide it anywhere on Earth, and still have money left over to build the space station from Moonraker....they probably had it hid in Hawaii or someplace ironic like in General Hawk's backyard.
"Well this is a wonderfully romantic spot. I wonder why it never caught on with the tourists," Lady Jaye said looking at the isolated snow land that the sun loomed over like a red beacon.
"The cold here drops below anything in the coldest part of America. Our suits will protect us from the worst of it but if Cobra has it's own method of protecting itself from the frost we'll be practically frozen when we reach them," Snow job answered.
"Oh," Lady Jaye answered and tested her javelin toss a bit for cramping.
"Listen up! We've got a long walk ahead of us if the information we managed to get from the air-trooper captured on Cobra Island is correct. We'll be meeting up with the October Guard for a joint mission to knock out the facility and find special armaments prepared for us in a spot for the strike. If Beach Head has done his mission right, any substantial terrorist forces will be chasing them down on the other side of Siberia," Flint said without apology to the sheer insanity of this particular mission. Flint personally believed that they should just forego the special operations aspect of the mission and roll over anything Cobra had summed up with regular military. All this cloak and dagger stuff was eventually going to bite them all in the....
"Looks like the October Guard found us Flint," Lady Jaye interrupted Flint's train of thought as he turned his attention to the red, white, and blue flares that were sent into the air nearby.
"I hate those people. They give me the creeps," Quick Kick said. The martial arts master had limited experience with the Russian equivalent of G.I. Joe but it had all been bad. He'd left his wife and two kids back in New York while some of his students ran his dojo but he'd promised he'd only get himself fighting some Ninjas, he'd hate to end up getting his epitheth written 'shot in the back by Boris and Natasha'.
"Well its been a democracy for some time. I'm sure President Putin only recruited the most upstanding men for the job." Dusty said. The Desert Man was one of the oddest recruits for the Siberian mission but one of the yokels between him and General Duke had made the assumption that the tundra and desert wasn't that different. In some respects Dusty was right for the job but in other ways they might have just recruited his gal Covergirl and put her in one of the ice suits they were wearing.
"Yeah okay and maybe someone will drop a house on the Cobra Commander and his father to save us the trouble of fighting them," Quick Kick added even as Lady Jaye began a brisk run when she saw the source of the flares.
Daina the second in command of the October Guard before it was reinstated and afterwards was stumbling down the snow tipped hills with a bullet wound in her side and bleeding heavily. There were burns and marks across her face to give mute testament to the horror that she had recently been through.
"Cobr...Cob.....General has traded his colors for theirs. October Guard is nearly wiped out.....they're bringing an army to finish the rest off," She managed to breath a bit more out before lasping into unconciousness.
"If Beach Head has done his mission right huh?" Lady Jaye stared at her husband with a condescending glare.
Beach Head personally had always hated being a civilian. He didn't like people as a rule butting their noses into his business, he didn't like people who were obnoxious that he couldn't kick the butt of, and there was absolutely nothing glamourous about wearing a damn tie and suit to punch numbers on a machine nine to five. He was glad to be in the Army again and this time it was going to be for life, no matter what his mother thought about it.
"Those damn Snakes knew we were coming!" Beach Head shouted at the top of his lungs. The G.I. Joe Angel-7 Stealth fighters that were their escort across the most deserted piece of tundra in Siberia were getting their asses blown out of them by Cobra's Phantom fighters. Every time the enemy fired they would appear for just a second then vanish again.
"Well Sir it's a bit late to be worrying about that now!" Demolition Derby shouted as weaved the Air Skimmer Troop Transport inbetween a pair of missles aimed at their engines.
"Well if you don't mind taking a woman's advice, we need to eject now," Icicle causally said as she blew a pink bubblegum bubble.
"I'll have none of that talk in my unit! This plane will be evacuated over my dead body!" Beach Head screamed as he waved his clenched fist toward the girl. She was trouble from the get go and reminded him of a more sarcastic version of Lady Jaye.
"You'd better be getting the coffin out then sir," Icicle pointed to the flames comming from their rear thrusters. They'd managed to catch a few vehicle blasts and that meant they couldn't go anywhere but down now. The Alaskan girl then started to suit up in her parachute right before Beach Head's flustered eyes.
"Sir I've got a mark on a potential landing spot for our evacuation. It'll be the perfect place to escape Cobra's assault!" Punch Card shouted as he looked up from his computer, adjusting the glasses that reminded Beach Head too much of the terrorist's drones.
"We're not going anywhere!" Beach Head grabbed the parachute off Icicle's back and then pulled out his pistol as he shot the control panel for the Air Skimmer in the cockpit.
"Are you out of your damn mind!" Infiltrator shouted even as the plane began moving forward to a crash landing.
"Our Father, who art in Heaven..." Last Chance began to say even as she braced herself in her seat.
"I know how much punishment this machine will take before it's on a one way ticket to Hell. If Demolition Derby is half as good as his reports say he is...and you better pray missy that he is...we should be fine. Plus Cobra wants us alive or we'd be dead already! I intend to make sure they wonder whether or not they failed in that respect!" Beach Head told them the plan he'd come up with in the first few minutes of this attack.
"That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard in my entire life!" Icicle screamed even as everyone braced for the impact as the plane was brought in low against the pine trees that exploded around the vehicle's descent.
Icicle didn't get to say much else before the plane shattered it's wings off and came to a screeching halt, pressed against the side of a snow bound hill. Surprisingly to every member of the team but Beach Head, they were all alive if a bit bruised.
"Ten hut! Everyone whose able to walk is getting out of here now!" Beach head shouted and shoot open the door locks to the plane's side.
"I think I wet my shorts," Punch Card said as he looked at the shattered monitor of his laptop.
"It'll keep you warm rookie. Harvest anything you can from the ship and get ready for Hell. We don't have much time to complete our mission and I'm not going home until we can transmit the coordinates of Cobra's rocket pad to G.I. Joe HQ!" Beach head shouted before Infiltrator pulled open the side of the doors.
"I knew I should have stayed in law," Last Chance muttered as she cut herself from the seat-belt.
***
8:45 PM
Washington D.C. was a glittering gem in the Nation's crown jewels but it was under martial law right now and the majority of the citizens had evacuated out of fear of a nuclear strike from Cobra's new super weapon. Under the guise of National Guardsmen G.I. Joe had regrouped and were currently using the empty Capital Hill building as their headquarters while a dummy G.I. Joe rode around on a armored train throughout the country.
"General Hawk, I don't like Beach Head and his team being used as decoys," Conrad Hauser said even as dozens of operatives worked feverishly at their consoles to try and decode Cobra's transmissions across the planet. Duke had just gotten off the phone with his wife and kids and the situation they described a the nation's mood was not at all comforting. Mass panic had settled in across America and there were no leaders in any position to reassure them that everything was going to turn out okay. Duke wasn't even sure that would be telling them the truth at this point either.
"I don't like it either Duke but these terrorists have been one step ahead of us since the game began. Flint's team is armed with our best operatives and the finest snow trained troops the country currently has to offer. I won't lie to you Duke that if our Siberia operation doesn't turn up results, we may have to start worrying more about damage control than actually winning the war," General Hawk said with a shake of his head before one of the officers brought him his coffee. With nothing to strike at, Hawk was enjoying himself lording over what he considered a useless bureaucracy in the military.
"You can't mean that Sir," Conrad said with a grit to his teeth. Duke had a strange relationship with General Hawk who was not only his commanding officer but his step-father. When Duke's father had died early on in Vietnam, just a few years before Duke went on to serve himself, then Captain Clayton Albernathy had gone on to court and marry Duke's mother and father his kid brother Falcon. Conrad had never let that interfere with their relationship though and though he had come to respect the man as a leader, he'd never been close to him as family.
"Several nations across Africa and the Middle East have already given their unconditional surrenders to Cobra operatives Duke. There is already reports from the C.I.A that intense fighting is going on in Russia and China between Pro-Cobra partisans and the loyalist military. The bean counters and inexperienced command left over from the attacks are already talking appeasing the new leadership rather than directly challenging them," General Hawk drank his coffee hard and shook his head clean of the cobwebs.
"You can't appease Cobra General Hawk, you know that," Conrad said, shaking his head. It wasn't the first time that Duke considered putting in a written to Hawk that they turn the United State's nuclear weapons supply into the sky. He'd already talked to a number of individuals about seeding the space like a mine-field to catch Cobra's cloaked space station full blast. The only problem with that was that he half suspected that was exactly what Cobra wanted and would simply put them in charge of a massive supply of weapons while their own machine inevitably ran down.
"No you can't and following their plan would make Hitler and Stalin look like men with pop guns given the amount of power they'd be turning over to the group. The Cold War would be just above room temperature in comparison," General Hawk had personally had to issue clandestein threats to a number of individuals to keep their mouth shut. He didn't like what this chaos was doing to him and he didn't like the feeling that a number of the people involved were almost eager to turn over the world to the fascist regime. One communication he'd let slip by was from the current leader in Germany whose parents were Nazi youth, he was already negiotiating for his country to turn on their allies for the past forty years against the Pro-Loyalist Baltics.
"Sir I've got something!" Mainframe said who had started work for AT&T and ended up going bankrupt with Dialtone before the NSA picked up his bills. Mainframe had changed the most in the decade since G.I. Joe. His love for Zarana had not apparently worked out very well and the two had parted terms on bad company, he'd eventually found himself involved with a very nice girl and had gotten a bit of a paunch from her cooking. Still he'd trained the finest crop of spies and number crunchers in the world.
"What is it?" Duke said, comming over as fast as he could, actually jumping over a few desks to do it.
"Just like General Hawk thought, there is a traitor in the G.I. Joe ranks. It was an almost undetectable transmission being conducted in the guise of radio broadcasts using a specific series of code words. The last one we've managed to catch and it confirms the traitor telling Cobra about the dummy train and the missions," Mainframe said as he put his hands through his slightly balding head.
"Any sign of the traitor's identity?" Duke asked as he looked at the information, it was thorough but disorganized.
"Not yet Sir," one of the rookies named Jack something said back.
"Perhaps we can turn this situation toward our advantage. Mainframe do we know enough about this code to send a fake broadcast of our own?" General Hawk said with a rather desperate but strong authority to his voice. He'd been working thirty-six hours straight and he was pretty much at his own wits end here.
"They're all based on ancient military commanders and Wizard of Oz references. I think I can figure it out enough to send a reasonable facimile but there's no guarentee it will work," Mainframe reluctantly admitted as he stuffed his hands in his pocket.
"Do it anyway. If we can do this properly we might be able to lure Cobra into a trap that will finish it off once and for all," General Hawk said, popping a cigarette into his mouth.
"And if it doesn't work General?" Duke said, expecting the answer.
"Every last man I send to do the job is likely to end up dead," General Hawk made no bones about the truth of the mission's danger.
***
"So long! Farewell! Alveterzay! Goodbye!" Quick Kick said with a smile as the Russian Farmer dropped Team C off at the end of the road in Siberia, literally. Team C was the actual strike team with the mission of knocking out Cobra Commander's secret facility. Personally Quick Kick had the idea that if Cobra could afford a gigantic rocket pad, a device that could hide it anywhere on Earth, and still have money left over to build the space station from Moonraker....they probably had it hid in Hawaii or someplace ironic like in General Hawk's backyard.
"Well this is a wonderfully romantic spot. I wonder why it never caught on with the tourists," Lady Jaye said looking at the isolated snow land that the sun loomed over like a red beacon.
"The cold here drops below anything in the coldest part of America. Our suits will protect us from the worst of it but if Cobra has it's own method of protecting itself from the frost we'll be practically frozen when we reach them," Snow job answered.
"Oh," Lady Jaye answered and tested her javelin toss a bit for cramping.
"Listen up! We've got a long walk ahead of us if the information we managed to get from the air-trooper captured on Cobra Island is correct. We'll be meeting up with the October Guard for a joint mission to knock out the facility and find special armaments prepared for us in a spot for the strike. If Beach Head has done his mission right, any substantial terrorist forces will be chasing them down on the other side of Siberia," Flint said without apology to the sheer insanity of this particular mission. Flint personally believed that they should just forego the special operations aspect of the mission and roll over anything Cobra had summed up with regular military. All this cloak and dagger stuff was eventually going to bite them all in the....
"Looks like the October Guard found us Flint," Lady Jaye interrupted Flint's train of thought as he turned his attention to the red, white, and blue flares that were sent into the air nearby.
"I hate those people. They give me the creeps," Quick Kick said. The martial arts master had limited experience with the Russian equivalent of G.I. Joe but it had all been bad. He'd left his wife and two kids back in New York while some of his students ran his dojo but he'd promised he'd only get himself fighting some Ninjas, he'd hate to end up getting his epitheth written 'shot in the back by Boris and Natasha'.
"Well its been a democracy for some time. I'm sure President Putin only recruited the most upstanding men for the job." Dusty said. The Desert Man was one of the oddest recruits for the Siberian mission but one of the yokels between him and General Duke had made the assumption that the tundra and desert wasn't that different. In some respects Dusty was right for the job but in other ways they might have just recruited his gal Covergirl and put her in one of the ice suits they were wearing.
"Yeah okay and maybe someone will drop a house on the Cobra Commander and his father to save us the trouble of fighting them," Quick Kick added even as Lady Jaye began a brisk run when she saw the source of the flares.
Daina the second in command of the October Guard before it was reinstated and afterwards was stumbling down the snow tipped hills with a bullet wound in her side and bleeding heavily. There were burns and marks across her face to give mute testament to the horror that she had recently been through.
"Cobr...Cob.....General has traded his colors for theirs. October Guard is nearly wiped out.....they're bringing an army to finish the rest off," She managed to breath a bit more out before lasping into unconciousness.
"If Beach Head has done his mission right huh?" Lady Jaye stared at her husband with a condescending glare.