Back Home – The Dual War
by Warringer
Chapter 49
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Loud explosions tore through the previously nearly silent network of caves, closely followed by the first screams and Arabic curses. The staccato like hammering of automatic weapons tore through the caves, coming from AK-47, MP-5 and M-4. More explosions followed, again followed by screams.
This was something akin to routine even since the New Allies had invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taiban, retaliate against Al Quaeda and, hopefully, extract the initiator of the acts of nuclear terrorism, Osama Bin Laden.
Deep within the caves, at the moment only protected by about twenty Taliban, Muhamed Al Ahmad let his fingers dance over the keyboard of the not quite surplus laptop many Al Quaeda cells used. He was just glad that the last plans had been copied to a USB stick and send towards Zabol in Iran. They were the finishing touch to what would be the final Jihad.
As the screams of dying of brothers in faith came closer, he stared intensely at the display as he formated the harddrive of the laptop. As it reached 100 percent he breathed in deep, before taking his AK-74. He directed the weapon at the laptop and fired, destroying the laptop as best as he could. He hoped that formating the harddrive and physically destroying the laptop was enough to keep the plans out of the hands of the American infidels.
Muhamed closed his eyes for a moment and muttered a short prayer, priming the vest of explosives he had put on after hearing the first explosions. The detonator in his one hand, his grip on his assault rifle intensified as he kicked open the door to his part of the cave and charged towards the Army Rangers that were assaulting the caves.
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Even if he disliked traitors out of principle, Army Lieutenant Oliver Barns had to say that the informations his platoon had proven correct so far. Even if it was highly unlikely that he would find either Bin Laden or any other AQ leader here, that traitor had spoken of informations of 'great importance'.
"La ilaha illallah!" was a scream that ripped him from his thoughts and his head whipped around towards a part of the cave network that had been ignored until now.
And he stared at an arab that was charging at them, the AK-74 in his hands firing wildly at his soldiers. That was until the fire of several M-4 and MP-5 started to rip into his torso, arms and legs. The arab tumbled onto the ground, the speed he had been running at causing him to slide about a meter over the wet rock of the cave.
Private O'Brian, one of the men of Alpha Squad, walked over to the man who now lay face first on the ground, groans still coming from the heavily bleeding body. The soldier turned the man around with the tip of his boot.
A very painful groan let O'Brian look into the face of the man and the strange facial expression, a smile that was mixed with a sense of bliss.
"Subhan Allah," was whispered by the man on the ground, blood flowing from the corners of his mouth.
"O'BRIAN! GET AWAY FROM HIM!"
O'Brian blinked as he heard the shout of Lieutenant Barns. Not having the time to react, he could only stare in horror as a small box rolled out of the arabs hand and at the explosive vest before his universe reduced itself to a blinding light, a loud sound and a feeling of pain before fading into nothingness.
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"It es always a pleasure doink business wit you," the man opposite to him said with a smile, the heavy Russian accent in his Spanish making him sound off to the ears of Rodolfo Suárez.
Rodolfo didn't really like to do business with the Russians, but in this case it was easier to get to the Russian Mafia and purchase the bits and pieces they needed than building them on their own. Especially when it came to parts they needed to build blockade runners like the three that were currently taking shape in the jungle around Medellín.
Rodolfo had learned much during the time he had worked under Felix Cortez and for Ernesto Escobedo. And he was using that knowledge that made him to the trusted right hand of Carlos Egaz.
Rodolfo looked behind the big Russian and at the number of large container trucks that were containing 'farm equipment'. He wanted to snort. In a sense they were farming equipment, as those fusion reactors, plasma drives, life support systems, shields and slipstream drives would allow the Cartel to search for new markets in the galaxy and 'farm' them.
The Russian laughed and his body guards and thugs piled into several vans, before driving away.
Rodolfo shook his head as he made a gesture that caused his own men to get into the trucks and drive them towards the places where the blockade runners were build. He snorted as he thought that those ships were based on a design they had found in the Earth Force Files, as they were commonly called. Some modification here and there and they were able to work with more powerful reactors and drives, allowing them to pull high accelerations to get away from any known pursuer.
Than he grinned. He had several engineers on his call and they were working to build two or three of those massive Ion and laser Cannons. That way the Cartel could enter the very profitable business of piracy.
Even if those things they bought from the Russians was more than twice as expansive than building them their selves, they were saving time and in the long run they would get much more profit. And Rodolfo would get his share of the big cake.
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Vasili Bushkin looked out of the window of his office in St. Petersburg. He was a man with two sides. On one side he was a very respectable businessman, running several industrial complexes in Sibiria and owning a good sixth of the Russian oil fields, and on the other side he was the leader of a good portion of the Russian Mafia.
In a sense it was irony that his industrial complexes were now back to building parts for the growing Russian space navy, reactors, plasma drives, life support systems, shields and the like. Parts that weren't only in high demand in Russia. He was selling them to just about everyone and several of them, mostly 'declared' to be 'junk' were sold on the black market.
His men had just finished a very good deal with the Medellín Cartel, enough systems to build a few small space ships. Other systems had been sold to Marshal Luo Cong, the leader of the 'Republic of China'. As far as Bushkin knew the dear Marshal wanted to build a few Monsoons on his own.
Even more profitable had been his dealing with several Arabic 'businessmen'. He had done business early last year, selling them a good dozen of nuclear warheads from R-36 missiles that had rusted in their silos. He knew that nuclear material of those warheads had been used in the nuclear terroristic attacks last year, but he couldn't really figure out how those had been so powerful.
Bushkin shrugged as he looked over St. Petersburg. He didn't really care. They had been paying him like anyone else.
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Colonel Lee Jong-sung frowned. He didn't like to work with these fanatics, because they were just that. Fanatics in every sense of the word. But he had to. He knew that he would be dead otherwise.
For a moment he closed his eyes. He couldn't really believe that it was just a month since he started working with them, here in this forsaken piece of dessert.
He shook his head. Even if they were fanatics, they had the same goal. Fight against the western nations, and most importantly the United States. They had, with the help of South Korea destroyed his country. He had been in Namp'o, observing the construction of the two first Northern Korean Monsoons, as the Chairman had launched the missiles at Southern Korea.
Lee had known immediately that his country wouldn't survive, but he was damned if he would let the part of the Monsoons fall into the Southerns hands. So he had ordered to take the little they had put together apart and load it on as many freighters as they could.
Just a day before the Southern Koreans were coming to his particular part of Namp'o they had left port and made best speed towards the Middle East. Little did he know that Al Quaeda would come to him and propose a working relationship.
Later when the pieces of the Monsoons had been unloaded the fanatics made quite clear that Lee and his men were to work with them or be dealt with extreme prejudice.
Now he was here and observed how his men, women and the fanatics put together a massive ship from the parts that were meant to become two different ships. And what they hadn't in actual hardware that was improvised. Hell, they were building the two Particle Cannons of the Monsoon into a single turret partly covered by the prow armor of one Monsoo, while the rest was little more than an open structure of steel I beams. Than there was also that long 'middleship', build from a larger number of freight containers.
It was an abomination that took shape in the middle of the dessert, right under the nose of American reconnaissance satellites. Most likely the Americans thought that Iran was building the ship.
Lee shook his head. There was another reason for him to work with those fanatics. Not the fear of being 'dealt with', but also the hatred and the need for vengeance against the western world. Something he shared with Al Quaeda.
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Captain Sergei Iljitsch Iwanov licked his dry lips and closed his eyes for a moment. A last glance went to the picture of his family that was stuck to the canopy of the MiG-37 Viper prototype he was about to fly. The picture was showing his family and, most importantly, his sister Susan.
He breathed in deep and his eyes want over the instruments that were originating from the MiG-29, like the rest of the cockpit and most of the avionics. Only a few instruments and the rather large monitor, reminiscent of the Americanski F-22, were new, showing him the information he would need in space.
"Everything looks okay," he called over the radio.
"Than commerce with ignition sequence."
"Affirmative."
Sure, he had flown the MiG-37 a few times, but that had been in the atmosphere and the Viper had handled like a dream, responding smoothly and exactly to his commands. Maybe it were the thrusters that made handling more easy while in the atmosphere, but he wasn't willing to bet on it.
Slowly his hand moved towards the switches of the ignition system and pulled up the caps before switching them to the other position. Not so far behind him three Kilmov RS-3 turbines began to whine as the energy of four fusion cells flew through them, pulling in air to turn it into a high energy plasma.
He watched the display as the indicators of the turbines climbed into the green and their optimal operating range.
"Requesting permission for lift off."
"You have permission for lift off, Viper One. Everything looks good."
Iwanov was glad for the telemetric links that was going to the test center. It would make sure that everything was going on correctly.
He pulled the breaks and the Viper began to roll down the runway. It was faster than the F-29 he had flown before, not much of a surprise considering that the three plasma turbines behind him had the thrust to accelerate him at more than ten times Earth gravity, at least according to the engineers.
The runway speed by and the end came at him at a fast pace.
As the speed climbed to more than 400 kilometers per hour, the speed he needed to pull the short winged space plane from the ground. But even than, the sheer thrust of his turbines still made it a short take off, basically making the Viper a STOL plane.
The flight plan was easy for the day. Pull the Viper into the 90 degree climb and push the turbines to the limit to get into space. Reach orbital velocity and than, after one orbit, make a reentry and get back to Earth.
So he pulled the Vipers nose up towards the sky, pushing the turbines to maximum and letting the thrust of the turbines push him towards space. The Viper shook briefly as she accelerated to and past the sonic barrier, pushing Iwanov into his ejection seat with four times Earth gravity as the turbines still had to fight against the atmosphere.
He felt strange as the miniature rocket, that was Earth' first self-developed space plane pushed through the thicker low atmosphere and the sky began to get darker and darker. He breathed evenly, briefly wondering if Juri Gagarin had felt the same.
Silently he watched as the meters in the HUD climbed towards and over the maximum ceiling he had pushed with a MiG-29, about 18,231 meters and far past his personal best speed he had pulled during a supersonic dive, 2510 kilometers per hours.
The sky continued to darken and soon he found it being pitch black. He had thought that he would see stars, but the only things he could see, were two of the Solar Trees that orbited Earth high above him.
He glanced sideways and idly noted that he could see the curve of Earth from his altitude and a good portion of Earth below, with the Caspian Sea gleaming close to the horizon.
His head moved back and snorted as the Viper had passed Mach 6.85, easily breaking the speed record of the X-15 of 1967.
Soon after he heard a short thunderclap echoing through the structure of the Viper, letting him know that the turbines had switched from using atmosphere to space mode, the three engines now drawing from the reaction mass of the Viper.
The indicators went back into the low area of their meters very briefly before climbing back to their previous reading. At the same time the acceleration died down for a brief moment vefore coming back twice as powerful as before.
The speed climbed faster now, as did the altitude.
As the altimeter climbed over the 100 kilometers mark, even through his speed was still under Mach 20, he smiled.
"Welcome to space, Sergei," he told himself." Welcome to space."
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"BE CAREFUL WITH THAT THING!"
Foreman Jack Wolf lowered his radio and frowned as he looked how Team Three moved the final of eight Warhammer plasma gatlings into its foundation. Just some patches of two meter thick armor here and there and USS Freedom would be finished as the first Monsoon build on Earth.
Wolfs eyes went around and at the other five Monsoons that were nearly finished sitting next to Freedom in the converted dry docks of Norfolk. And than there were several more Monsoons in various states of construction, like USS Gettisburg who was curretly not much more than the groundwork, some armor plates, reactors and got her Particle Cannon installed.
Even further away he could see the area where whole sections of a Warlock were super build. Together with several other places in the US, the Warlock would be finished and put together in space in about three month if nothing went wrong.
He grinned as he watched how Team Three began to connect the high energy lines, command systems and the reaction mass feed to the Warhammer. Even if he had to kick his teams asses, he was finishing Freedom more than a week before schedule, even if he had had several problems, like one hectare of armor that had the wrong thickness and specification.
He snorted at that thought, here he had to deal with whole hectares of armor that was thicker than that of most battleships during First or Second World War.
And than there was the fact that most of his men weren't even trained for this job. Hell, no one was really trained to build spaceships like this. Wolf himself used to build oil rigs for the Gulf of Mexico in Mississippi.
The entire program to build up new industries nearly from scratch, especially production and subcontractor industries, had reduced the number of jobless to less than a million in the last few month and there was a good chance that the US wouldn't have any jobless come summer. And it was that way everywhere on Earth. The Germans called it the 'Zweite Wirtschaftswunder', the 'Second Economic Wonder'.
It was a little bit ironic that the entire world now fought a war against those who made that possible. Wolf knew a few of his man who would like to thank the Doranians for their new jobs, before shooting them.
"Carver! Get that turret done already!"
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"You're insane you know that, Wolfman?"
James 'Wolfman' O'Conner grinned at his colleagues.
"Hey, it works," he answered," doesn't it?"
In the screen in front of him was the image from a CAD program, showing the outlines of a starship the BAE team had been ordered to design by the British Admiralty. They had wanted a ship with the ability to carry fighters, while packing a good amount of punch to act as Assault Carrier.
"I have to give you that," Mark Williams answered." Any weaponry you want it to have?"
"How about a GOD or two? And some heavy turrets. Plasma, laser and railguns."
His colleagues snorted.
"That is the bloody Galactica, Wolfman," Williams said.
"The one from last years miniseries to boot."
Williams rolled his eyes.
"Thank you, Miles..."
O'Conner just continued to grin.
"She's perfect for the job. The right design for fast launch of her fighters, fast landings and rearming with the large bays and the space to carry an armament that is perfect for fast assaults. Not to mention that the fighters bays are mostly independent from the rest of the superstructure."
Williams and the rest of the team nodded.
"We wanted an innovative idea. I guess that would be innovative."