Christopher Nuttall: Invasion

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 ?”