Christopher Nuttall - A Learning Experience

Romford smirked. “Phasers on stun?”

“Definitely,” Steve said, rolling his eyes. The alien stunners worked surprisingly well, although the results tended to vary. A strong man might be out for a few minutes, while a weaker man or a child might sleep for nearly an hour. He still wished he’d had them in Afghanistan, though. They could have stunned everyone and then sorted the innocent from the guilty afterwards. “We don’t want to kill anyone.”

He ran through the tactical situation as the helicopters came into view, their rotor blades chopping through the air. It looked as though they intended to try to hover over the ranch and rappel down to the ground, a tactic that did make a certain kind of sense if they expected a hot reception. Or, perhaps, they wanted to surround the ranch and then move in. It didn’t really matter, he told himself. They were in for a very rude surprise.

“Launch the screamers,” he ordered, quietly.

Jürgen heard the alarms as the helicopter shook, more violently than ever before. What was wrong? Even the strong men were starting to panic as the shaking grew worse, followed by a faint crackling sound that left the air feeling ionised. There was a series of loud bangs from underneath the helicopter, then she dropped like a stone.

“We’re going to have to make an emergency landing,” the pilot said. He no longer sounded amused by his own daring. Instead, he sounded almost fearful. “Brace for impact!”

“They’re all going down,” another voice said. It took Jürgen a moment to place it as the team’s commander, a smug man who’d laughed while Jürgen had been trying not to be sick. “Every last helicopter is going down…”

The noise of the craft’s engines grew louder, then stopped. Seconds later, there was a thunderous crash as they hit the ground. Jürgen’s eyes snapped open, revealing two of the stormtroopers forcing open the hatch and jumping out of the craft. The agent caught his arm and dragged him forward, practically throwing him after the stormtroopers. He landed badly, but there was no time to hesitate. The entire craft might be about to catch fire and explode.

“My God,” the agent said. “What happened?”

Jürgen followed his gaze. All nine helicopters had crash-landed, their passengers spilling out onto the grassy field. Some of them were smoking slightly, their pilots ordering the men to run for their lives. Others seemed almost intact, utterly undamaged. It was impossible to tell what had happened to them. There had been no reason for all nine helicopters to suffer the same fault at the same time.

“I don’t know,” he answered. But he thought about the dongles and wondered, grimly, just what else might have been invented in secret. Something to take down helicopters? “I…”

“ATTENTION,” a voice boomed. Jürgen turned to see five men standing on a grassy knoll, holding unfamiliar-looking weapons in their hands. “Discard all weapons, then proceed away from the helicopters into the field behind you. I say again, discard all weapons and then proceed into the field behind you. Resistance will not be tolerated.”

The team’s commander purpled rapidly. “You are under arrest,” he shouted, lifting his rifle. “Put down your guns and surrender, you…”

“Discard all weapons and proceed into the field behind you,” the speaker repeated. “There will be no further warnings.”

“No,” the commander said. He lifted his rifle and fired, once. The bullet glanced off the speaker in a flash of blue light and vanished somewhere in the distance. “I…”

The speaker returned fire. There was a flash of blue-red light and the commander dropped to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Jürgen stared, then leaned forward to examine the body. As far as he could tell, the man had simply been knocked out. There were certainly no physical wounds. Moments later, the speaker lifted his weapon and discharged a brighter shot into the ground in front of the DHS team. There was a colossal explosion, which cleared rapidly to reveal a small crater, smoking like a volcano. Jürgen gulped — just what the hell had they stumbled into? — and then obeyed orders. The rest of the team discarded their weapons and followed Jürgen into the next field.

“Pussies,” Romford sneered. “Big and tough when it comes to picking on unarmed men and women, but useless when their target fights back.”

Steve privately agreed. In his view, the view he’d been taught by his parents, the truly brave men went into the infantry, where they matched themselves against the enemy infantry. It was true that policemen were brave too, but it wasn’t the same. And the sort of people who would crash in like stormtroopers when they thought they had a cause weren’t worthy of any respect at all.

“Keep them covered,” he ordered. The DHS team looked thoroughly cowed, but appearances could be deceiving. Steve had seen prisoners move from cooperative to riotous within seconds in Afghanistan. “Secure their weapons, then find out who’s in charge of this bunch of monkeys.”

He examined the stormtroopers as his men moved to obey. They looked professional, too professional. Steve doubted his Marine platoon had looked anything like as good while they’d been in service, except perhaps when they’d been on parade. But, as Steve had been taught more than once, it was possible to look good or to be good. Few units managed both at once.

Perhaps we should have let them rappel down to the ground, he thought, snidely. We could have seen just how well they fucked it up.

He shook his head. There was no time for delay. The helicopters might not have managed to get off a distress signal before the screamers brought them down, but someone might well have noticed that all nine transponders had vanished. These weren’t the lax pre-9/11 days. The vanished transponders would bring some sort of reaction, probably fighter jets intent on searching for prospective terrorists. And they would probably have some ground forces in the area too. Steve had done the same in Afghanistan.

Romford returned, marching a pair of men ahead of him. Neither of them looked particularly professional; one was clearly an analyst, while the other was a Washington suit. Steve saw the simmering anger, mixed with shock and terror, in the latter’s eyes and smiled inwardly. A shocked man was a man who could be drained of information, then used as a messenger.

“Good afternoon,” he said, with mock politeness. “And who do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

The Washington man swallowed, then looked down at the grass. “Cyril Dorsey,” he said reluctantly. The man beside him let out a sound that sounded like a choked-off giggle. “I’m from the NSA.”

Steve lifted his eyebrows. “The NSA?”

“Yes,” Dorsey said. He railed, either through grim determination or through a sudden awareness of his companion’s amusement. “And you are in a boatload of trouble.”

“Try saying a shitload ,” Steve advised. “It sounds so much more dramatic.”

He sighed, fighting down the temptation to start yelling at the damned bureaucrat. “What are you doing here?”

The analyst glared at him. “What are you doing with the veterans?”

Steve was momentarily nonplussed. The veterans? And then it clicked. Someone had noticed that a number of veterans were disappearing, then tracked it back to the ranch and realised that the trail ended there. Hell, he wouldn’t have given the NSA the time of day, but perhaps the analyst had good reason to be concerned about the veterans. For all he knew, they could have been sacrificed to the dark gods.

“The veterans are fine,” Steve assured him. He briefly considered introducing Romford, then decided against it. The veteran looked young enough to be his own son. “But you have trespassed on my property.”