MOONLIGHT SERENADE
Our Fuckin’ Princess is in Another Castle.
Sikorsky MH-53R Night Mare PAVE LOW V, “Anvil Zero-Two,” Pizza Rat Stallion, #172334/YK 09
Over Monte Sacro, Gargano, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Captain Jeffrey Banks, United States Marine Corps (CERFOR)
Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 85
2107 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
The trio of T411 turboshaft engines roared with the power of thirty-thousand horses. The rotors set a ceaseless beat and the massive helicopter shook as they rolled over wooded hills and rocky ridges. The cockpit was doused in red light as Captain Banks peered through his AN/AVS-12 panoramic night vision goggles. The digital hybrid thermal-night optics showed the world in faded color and neon outlines.
“Two minutes,” he spoke into the intercom. He felt every anxious breath, the sweat under his gloves, but his voice gave presented but cool confidence.
Four black PAVE LOWs thundered over forests and fields with a mere two and a half feet from the ground as they fanned out from staggered column to a line abreast. An escorting pair of UH-1Z Iroquois Warriors were two intervals to their front. Banks was no lily-livered stick jockey—he had more combat flight hours than he cared to think about, including the magnificent clusterfuck that was Operation DANGEROUS FEATHERDUSTER back in Taipei in 2039—and he was fully clenched. HMH-85 was MARSOC’s special operations aviation unit—permanently seconded to the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment as its sixth battalion.
The strike package screamed ahead into a night that was not so tenebrous. Banks could make out low structures strung along the spine of a rocky ridge off in the distance: Monte Sant’Angelo. Any other night, it would’ve been a place of beauty—a place of pilgrimage—that overlooked the endless olive groves and rolling fields of the Tavoliere.
Tonight, the village had box seats to a Very Good Idea: Operation FRICTION, the seizure of the Foggia Airfield Complex. With over a dozen hard surface runways, it was home to the bulk of the Axis Forces’ advanced aviation in the region, some two hundred jet aircraft, and at least an equal number of high-performance super-props. But the complex was guarded by a regiment of EPIMETHEAN flak—without even so much as prox fuse ammo—two Class C PROMETHEAN radar stations and barely twenty operational night fighters. That was before the day’s sun had dipped beneath the horizon—and now the Table of the Apulias was lit by fire as blood flowed like floodwaters.
Tracers raced up into the night sky behind the ridge. Flak burst like lightning. Shells and bombs rolled like thunder. Fire and flame of every sort betrayed the darkness. A dozen or more searchlights cast their irate illumination into the clouds in contempt of Allied air superiority. One guttered out, then another. A fuel bunker detonated with a burst of rapidly expanding melodrama.
The pathfinder elements from the American 82nd and British 1st Airborne Divisions were on the ground, sowing a whirlwind before the bulk of their formations arrived. With any luck, the joint Canadian-American 10th Special Forces Regiment had seized the largest OLYMPIAN-spec hard surface airfield Amendola as Banks and his flight made their final sprint to the target. The chutes flipped the table while the Not-Green Berets kicked the door open. A corps-sized formation would make landfall behind enemy lines without so much as touching a static line. It was a new twist on a classic airborne joint-combined forcible entry.
But Banks and his flight of blacked-out Shitters were doing something altogether different. Something of tantamount importance to the war in Europe. It was just two sentences—a pairing that dripped with dreadful consequence.
Secure Objective PEACH by any means—intact and in good condition. Under no circumstances should Objective PEACH remain in the possession of the Axis Forces.
The flight continued to close to the target. An assault troop of the Forcemen loudly made their final kit checks. It was said that the Archangel Michael had visited this place thrice, but now the Devil’s Brigade was coming. The captain took a breath as he looked up at a belt of low, dark clouds streaming from the Adriatic. The meteorology guys promised the weather would hold.
The voice of the air commander in Anvil Zero-One broke across the net—a smooth, deep southern drawl, “Hammer, Anvil. Initiate attack.”
The familiar voice of a Zulu jock answered back, “Rog, Anvil. Beginning our run.” The Iroquois Warriors broke left before hooking right onto a parallel course with the ridge. A burst of triple-A from distant fighting reached up into the sky from the fighting behind the ridge, backlighting the town—a brilliant lash of over-euthanasic tracers doing their best to kill Zeus.
Hammer Two lit off a pair of Super Zulu laser-guided rockets. The 5-inch diameter, 128-pound weapons screamed out of their pod as the Hueys let slip the dogs of war. The little gunships had a GAU-19/D 10.6x81mmK minigun and an automatic 40mm grenade launcher in their chins—plus two M2A2 HMGs in the same punchy .416 Barrett-derived cartridge in their doors. And to finish it off, they were both armed with a 19-round pod of AGR-20F Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System guided rockets and a 4-round pod of AGR-25D Laser Zunis.
The gryojet-assisted 40-mike-mike grenades left the barrel with barely a flash—the result of their electrothermal chemical ignition and hybrid polymer cases—before their rocket motors flared to life. The pair of helicopters hosed their point targets with a stream of continuous fire. It was one hell of a bolt from the blue.
With a flick, Banks zoomed his bird’s FLIR in toward their targets and saw a 37-millimeter Breda AA analog mount get rendered down to slag—with its panicking crew. Half a dozen other targets were sent straight to hell in ten seconds. Sucks to suck. However, the focus of their pint-sized Hinds’ fury was the hotel that had been assessed by G-2, Allied Force Headquarters as the garrison’s command post. The modest structure collapsed in a cloud of black smoke and a shower of splinters.
“One minute!” Banks barked into the intercom as the Hueys poured streams of lead into the streets and mulched the targets that photo-reconnaissance had kindly marked out for them. Gunny Baxter, Banks’ crew chief, repeated the warning as he helped the HSRT master ready the ropes. The Canadians nervously traded looks as brilliant buzz-sawing whips of tracers spat out into the night. These boys had barely heard of helicopters six months ago, and now they were going feet-first into a fight from one.
The Warriors were so low that one of them scraped a skid on the sun-faded red-orange shingles of the town’s row houses. Huey pilots were always fucking crazy—only the deranged willingly piloted a tin can rocket. The contraption had 6,400 shaft horsepower in a 20,000-pound MTO airframe. The Corps had planned to replace the AH-1Z and UH-1Y with the AV-28E Navajo, something that could escort their VTOL fleet all the way to the LZ, but that was money that the Corps didn’t have. So, instead, they put the twin T901-GE-300B engines on a Venom and bought gunship models of the Q-27 Shrike as a MUM-T package. The program ended up costing more than what was projected for the AV-28—and the DAP kit for the MV-28 during Second Sino had more or less ended up the same thing as the AV-28 proposal—but that was all in the past of yesterday’s future.
“Thirty seconds!” Banks roared. The Axis in the village made their reply. A fusillade of ground fire erupted from figures spilling onto the streets and roofs. The bum-krak-krak of bolt-guns and the rattle of sub-guns plinked the side of Anvil Zero-Two as Banks updated his pos on the group net. The other birds were making their approaches. It was going to plan even if it sounded like there was a lot more than a company-and-a-half of Italian infantry holed up on site.
Tony could plink away all they like, but they’d need something a bit heavier to bring down a Romeo Stallion. The MH-35R was not only a new build with Duracal metal-matrix composite construction, top-of-the-line engines, and all the kit and kaboodle expected for a SOF lifter; it also had ATLATL. The Advanced Tactical Lift Armor Technical and Life Extension Package was the gold standard for airborne armor. The ship’s vital systems were always, and its cabin could be, lined with graphene-laced imbricated composite inserts, allowing the aircraft to trade about 10% of its max range for small arms protection—just the thing to bring to a spicy LZ.
“DeLario, Jones!” Banks barked at his door gunners, “Drop some lead on those motha-fuckers!” The pair of Cert enlisted complied. Whips of ultramarine tracers burst from the M134A7 Gatling guns, scything down the Axis shooters. They gave Banks the time to bring the aircraft over to their entry point. “Standby! Ready on ropes!”
Baxter pushed his head out the back, peering into the night with his NODs, “Clear to descend, Skip.” Banks pushed the aircraft lower, keeping it steady as the rotor wash bounced up the narrow streets, throwing up a bought of turbulence. “Hold! Hold! We’re good!” Gunny shouted.
Banks kept to the script, “Ropes down!” He’d done this show a million times, even if he had spent the last year training Gennies to fly bleeding-edge antiques. He kept his nerves and his focus on the task at hand. There were more bad guys than intelligence had expected, but Banks would not look a gift horse in the mouth.
“Rope on the deck!” Gunny Baxter and the Gennie HRST master took over, deploying two ropes out the back. The checklist proceeded like a cold call-and-response. Banks saw the three other Stallions in position, readying their assault teams. “First man off!”
“Second!” followed a moment later, and then came “Third!”
“Fourth! Team One Down!” and “Fifth!”
“Sixth!”
“Seven!” The firefight roared back to life. A hail of bullets slammed into the cabin. The gunners needed no command to reply. The sound of Zulu Hueys touching off a lead storm filled the air, deafening the devil with instant thunder.
“Seventh!”
“Eight!”
“Nin—”
Thunder overwhelmed the muffled intercom call. It was flak. Something heavy. Something that could kill a shitter decked in ATLATL. The noise of the Chi-Com’s heavy-weight semi-autonomous PG-187 100-millimeter cannon was not something Banks would ever forget. His co-pilot wordlessly flicked the ship’s ECM alive and to full power. CERFOR had hoped to avoid this. Every second they radiated could give the Axis reams of technical data to improve their defenses and weaken the Allies’ electromagnetic dominance.
“Flak, Flak, Flak!” One of the other shitters cried over the net.
“Tenth!” Baxter kept counting.
“They aren’t painting us, but it’s—” Lieutenant Cha started before the Stallion’s Laser/Radar-Warning Receiver came alive, an unwelcome unholy digital screech.
“Twelfth!”
“Divert to alternate. Divert. I say again. Divert,” the mission commander remained cool as his mission fell apart around him. This was supposed to be an easy smash grab. They had expected a modest garrison without much, or any, PROMETHEAN equipment systems.
Banks prayed that the ECM and the swish RAM coating would be enough.
Muzzle flashes licked the sky at a continuous rate. There had to be a whole goddamn battalion of guns—but Banks had too much on his hands to be sure, “That shit is on fuckin’ automatic.'“ Cha growled.
“Gunny, Abort! Abort! Abort! We’re going to the alternate!” He saw a pair of figures drop below the ramp. Fuck. Anvil Two and Three swung out ahead of them, their rotors nearly kissing rooftops along the western face of the ridge, heading south toward the alternate LZ.
The luck ran out.
An explosion ripped open the starboard canopy and cheek of Anvil Two. It was a decapitation. A stallion with a burning headless stump lost all control inputs and nosed straight down into a row of buildings. The $175 million irreplaceable aircraft was gone in seconds. They needed to get going, or they would be next.
Gunny Baxter turned around and met eyes with Banks. The tone in the captain’s ear changed. One he knew all too well.
“We’re cle—!”
Too late.
Baxter disappeared in a flash that rocked the entire aircraft sideways. The blast rocked the entire aircraft sideways like they’d been shoulder-checked. It ripped a Hilux-sized hole in the cabin wall and painted the interior in blood, shrapnel, and blackened char.
“Abort! Abort!” The captain screamed as he fought to regain control of his aircraft and get it out of harm’s way. A second explosion swallowed his words as it slammed into the Stallion. His display lit up with alerts and warnings. The helo’s third engine was gone. He didn’t have hydraulics to cut, but the fiber optics to the bird’s electro-mechanical actuators were bottlenecked. “Flares! Dump ‘em!”
Cha thumbed a button on the main console, activating their Hail Mary. A deluge of dumb flares and chaff burst from the rear of the aircraft as Banks slammed the throttle to full power. The aircraft’s two Air Nulka decoys screamed out, spreading out in the X-Y-and-Z axes, each generating an electromagnetic replica of their Shitter.
The third shot came a second later. It was low, detonating in the false returns of one of the Nulkas as the Shitter nosed forward and gained altitude.
“Anvil Zero-One, aborting. We’re taking large caliber triple-a, my number three engine is gone, EMA command response throttled at eight five percent—and I’ve got causalities.” The battle raged below as the Snake Eaters lit off three 66mm rockets in rapid succession. A muted fountain of flashes burst from a T60 machine gun in the alley below them as an Italian HMG started spitting lead from a concealed firing position in a civilian building.
How many fuckin’ Eye-Ties are in this shithole?
“Anvil, it’s a fucking Flak Eighty—” The voice cut out. There was a flash. Banks saw the mangled form of a UH-1Z, shattered by a bouquet of MANPADS cutting across the discordant night. The Iroquois Warrior had a Self-defense Active Defeat Laser System—a small laser for zapping MANPADS seeker-heads—but there were just too many. Ten dumb-as-bricks darts curled and twirled off into the night.
Banks’ Shitter banked and yaw—it struggled to listen to his inputs. He glanced back at the source of the mess. He counted the gun bursts. Four guns. He saw a river of blackened figures running between the flashes.
Someone, something in the back of his mind, has a sense of humor. His lizard brain picked out a single figure standing still, holding something on his shoulder. Banks didn’t need any other warnings. The skipper jammed a finger into the console. The night grew yet brighter. The MANPADS man flinched, and a dart of fire blitzed into the night. Its seeker was immediately overwhelmed by the flares and slammed into a rooftop. The cannon that had hit him twice missed again.
The avalanche of electromagnetic countermeasures must’ve blinded the Skysweeper’s shit-ass fire control radar set—or Nazi gunners just sucked for shit. Another second later, a round missed by mere feet. Its fuse detonated in a shotgun blast that shredded someone’s lovely home.
“Gunny’s gone—same with the rope master and the Canuck platoon leader—I think.” Lieutenant Cha wearily reported to no one in particular.
“Fu—” The fifth round’s fuse worked as intended, sheering the aircraft’s tail off. It entered a spin. Cha and Banks fought to keep control of 40 tons—and lost. They were losing altitude and entering a counterclockwise spin. “Anvil Zero-One, going down. I say again, Anvil Zero-One is going down hard.”
The PAVE LOW clipped the roof of a rowhouse before slamming into the opposing street, bringing down the building around them. Inertia was not going to let them down easily. They rolled through the lightly built structure like a freight train and descended one story before coming out the other side with enough force to impale through the first floor of the next block. The final impact knocked Banks unconscious. The skipper of this shitter was out cold before his aircraft came to a stop.
Near Amendola Air Base
Amendola, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Major May Locke, United States Marine Corps (CERFOR)
Deputy-Executive Officer, 10th Special Forces Regiment (Combined, Airborne)
2109 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
“Boss, you know, I think she’s the one,” Corporal D’Antonio wistfully remarked, his eyes not even slightly directed at the road. The electric Willys Jeep whined as it weaved over the narrow olive orchard track in the forced twilight of flak and fires. The Jeeps and purloined Opel Blitzes hurled down the road without the help of their headlights at a somewhat unreasonable speed, led by three Super Jackal raiders vehicles. The leading vehicles—with six wheels and 300 horses from an adiabatic opposed-piston hybrid-electric powertrain—were kitted out with FN MAGs and miniguns in .30-06, an unholy union of future and past. The Boss provides. But they were late and needed to make up time. Locke silently thanked her past self, who had insisted that the regiment’s drivers be STARLIGHT qualified—and the Baby Snaker Easter, who had stolen enough NOD tubes so they could be properly equipped.
The Major was in the back, pushed into the corner, facing sideways. The suppressor-muzzle device of her mid-length M20 Enhanced Standard Carbine SOPMOD dug into the side of a Generalmajor Paul Diechman, the Chief of Staff of II Fliegerkorps, the Luftwaffe’s main operational command in Italy. The round-faced officer was still in shock, little more than blubber with a pale face and a gaping jaw in a grey uniform.
Major Locke snorted dismissively, “This is the third ‘the one,’ Michelangelo… That cute thing in Lompoc. The one with orange hair in Oran. She was well… need I say gyatt? You should take some time. Reflect on what you want because you’re clearly not finding it. I’ve said this before, Mikey: I can teach you technique, but I can’t give you spirit. You have to find that yourself.” She chuckled as she took a drag from her vape. She had precious few pods left; the liquid was worth its volume in gold.
“Was ist ‘gyatt?’” The fat Nazi interrupted sheepishly. He scowled at Locke, his face an ever-shifting stage of disgust and shame.
Shaw—the recce company’s Canuck commanding officer and the on-hand polyglot—annoyedly looked at his superior, “Need I translate?” He sighed wearily, “What does that even mean, ma’am?”
Locke chuckled and spoke in her best German—one class during undergrad and a fling with a Bundeswehr attaché during a stint in the OSATO Secretariat in Osaka, “Attraktives Mädchen mit eine Wunderschön hintern.”
Both the Canadian captain and German general gave her the most awfully confused look. “Wovon in Gottes Namen redest du?” Locke, with a radio handset crammed between her ear and shoulder, said nothing but drove the barrel of her rifle into the side of the Nazi, who yelped and shut up. The present illuminating conversation was of secondary concern to her.
Columns of fire rose into the night sky from the Tortorella Airbase, where they had found the general. Locke was kicking herself that they killed most of his staff before someone had realized they’d shot up a bunch of HVTs on a command tour. At least that Canadian troop leader had kept some alive for the intel boys back in Oran. She made a mental note to keep an eye on that one, good material.
The Major was not too worried about Nazis or Fascisti. She was more worried about the good guys. They had lost three to blue-on-blue incidents coming back. There were paras everywhere, and they were as jumpy as the Jersey Devil skezzed out on bath salts. The charm had worn off. She had taken the regimental reconnaissance company out to fight for information—ideally, seize radios and code books, but like a trip to Costco… things had escalated.
Locke was officially the regiment’s “deputy executive officer,” a wonderfully opaque billet and one that concealed the breadth of her station. This regiment was as much her’s as it was Colonel Frederick’s—to the chagrin of more than a few. She had retrained—remolded—the First Special Service Force into the best light infantry force outside of the Certain Force and to her old unit—4th Raiders. The Mother of Snakes had her ways. They had called her Bitch—now most of them called her Boss.
“Five, you’re clear on to perimeter, 500 meters,” the voice on the end of the radio crackled as they turned left onto a paved road. Locke switched channels and feathered the transmitted twice. The Jackals put the pedal to the metal; the Willys kept up, and the six Opel tractor-trailers filled with fifty-odd a thousand gallons of avgas, and JP-Nazi did their best to keep pace.
GOD was some pimple-faced chair jockey sitting in TABERNACLE—AFHQ’s central headquarters carved into Mount Murdjadjo under Fort Santa Cruz in Oran—running an RQ-20B Revenant. This drone—delightfully named Milwaukee Sober—had been in the air for fifteen and half hours, which gave Locke about thirty minutes of overwatch before it had to start its two-hour return flight to its home airfield in Sicily. However, GOD had a split focus—Locke was not her only angel.
There were three YAC-119 Shadows in the air over the Tavoliere. They had been rushed from the Fairchild plant in Hagerstown, Maryland, before they had completed acceptance trials. The Gennies were shitting bricks, worried that FRICTION would backfire and compromise the entirety of PHALANX. So, they asked for all the help they could get, and that included four .30-06 miniguns and two 20-millimeter rotary cannons in a Boxcar. Even though their infrared and night vision optics were quaint, they were still the best night attackers outside of a Certain Force.
A river of lead flowing down from above the clouds heralded their presence.
When the dawn rose, every Fascisti and Nazi in southern Italy would fear the night.
“Many thanks, Milwaukee. We app—” She stopped herself as something woke up on the promontory. Ribbons of tracers, flak bursts, and flames. Something burning fell from the sky. “Milwaukee—I’m seeing some heavy contact up on Objective PEACH. Can you get eyes? Over.”
“Rog, Five Delta.” The droner went quiet, “Oh.” He went quiet again. “We’ll get back to you. Out.”
“Fuck,” she hooked the handset back into the long range. She felt it in her bones—things were getting complicated. A dozen MANPADS ripped into the night and got something.
Shaw looked up at the mountain, and he grimaced. “Christ.”
She switched the radio to the regimental freak. “Snake Eater X-Ray, Snake Eater Five Delta. On final approach to Lemon. Eureka. I say again. Eureka. Over.”
The familiar voice of Colonel Robert Frederick, the regiment’s commander, hissed back over the mild static, “Five Delta, this is Six. Proceed directly to Hotel Two. Over.” He did not sound amused.
“Five Delta, a-firm. Out.” She flicked back to the battalion net, but before she started directing the convoy in, she told her driver, “Mikey, Hangar Two. Express.”
“Got it, boss,” he replied, “We goin’ up there?” He flicked his head toward the fires on the ridge.
Locke said nothing for a moment as the convoy zipped past the airfield’s main gate without as much braking, a shadowy figure with a rifle and raised STARLIGHT NODs waving them through. The small guard house had been blasted to pieces—blood and bullet holes pockmarked what remained. The bodies of the dead Italian soldiers had been policed, but the scene was now lit by the burning wrecks of a half dozen armored cars and half-tracks, now blazing like candles. The vehicles whipped up the flames as they swished past. The corpses of the would-be rescuers of Amendola were splayed out, slain without so much as a whisper fired at the entrenched company from the Regiment’s 1st Battalion that had welcomed them.
As they swerved to avoid a burning Sd.Kfz. 231, the Jeep rocked like they had hit a speed bump. The flattened, splattered corpse splayed out in the road was visible in the flicking firelight. “Odds are,” Locke muttered to no one in particular.
Torre dei Giganti, Castello Di Monte Sant’Angelo, Monte Sant’Angelo
Gargano, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Major Tillman Von Feuchtersleben, Luftwaffe
Flakgruppe Tillman, Flak-Regiment 22, 1. Flak-Division
2120 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
Six 8.8 cm Auto-Flugabwehrkanone 43s continued their song—one deafening note every one and a half seconds. Von Feuchtersleben’s adjutant was shouting over the wire telephone to get the guns to cease firing. They could not afford to waste their Elektrosicherung fused ammunition. However, rounding counting was not at the forefront of the Major’s mind—radar emissions were.
They had driven off a score of Allied aircraft and had killed no less than eight, perhaps even a dozen. But they had detected the distinct emissions of something that kept every Luftwaffe artillery officer up at night. Flakjäger. Abwehr said the Americans called the mission “Drunk Weasel.”
That is why the major loomed over the shoulder of the chief operator of his battalion’s primary search radar. They were only radiating for ten-second bursts, which OKL had estimated would be sufficient to prevent a lock by the Shrike. That estimate was three months old.
A pale-faced Gefreiter, who had taken a wound to one of his legs from machine gun fire, rested against the battlements with a tube on his shoulder. He eyed the empty sky with equal parts contempt and fear. That fiberglass tube on his shoulder looked like a prop but could fell dragons. Von Feuchtersleben and his staff had been suspicious of the new weapon after it had been foisted upon them by the Reichs-Verteidigungs-Organisation’s Sonder Lehrkommando zur Besonderen Verwendung. They had been given almost no training, but the Pm 313 had clearly been named “Fliegerfaust” for a reason. They had killed a dozen—no more than a dozen—Yankee “Drachen.” However, one thing did not sit right with Von Feuchtersleben—one of the technicians who had come with the weapons from Peenemunde called it Judeo-Bolshevik drivel.
But how? Maybe the weasels aren’t the only ones that are drunk.
The Major took his eyes off this PPI display for a moment, but something caught his eye. His head snapped back, and a shiver flashed down his spine, “SCHIEß!” The enlisted operator shouted. The screen was consumed by a green-white blizzard.
“SHUT IT DOWN! DOWN! VERTDAMMT! TERMINATE ALL EMISSIONS! MY GOD SHUT IT ALL DOWN!” The Major’s voice rose to a bellow before he even realized it. The adjutant was on the field telephone shouting to the gun crews. The technicians fluttered hither and dither to smother their high-power radar set. They would permanently damage the search radar if they moved out of sequence while deactivating it.
The missiles came screaming out of the dark—two quartets of barely visible white darts moving with blistering speed, streaking straight toward them.
Lockheed EF-89B Electro-Scorpion, Angel Baby, WW/43-1092
Gargano, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Captain Hank “Henry” Ableton, United States Army Air Forces (GENFOR)
313th Fighter-Bomber Squadron, 35th Fighter Group (Tactical, Interdictor)
2121 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
Captain Ableton slammed his Scorpion into full reheat and banked hard to the left. The straight-wing fighter responded immediately as a little more than 30,000 pounds of thrust poured out from its pair of J57-P-2 turbojets. He dumped flares and chaff as he bled off what little altitude he had left and screamed back across the plains.
“Well, we get any Goose?”
“I—SHITFIRE!” His RIO, Flight Officer Ruturon Rettle, interrupted himself. “Now that’s a Goddamn hit! We got something. It’s cookin’ off!”
Ableton checked his mirrors, and sure enough, three plumes of fire and white-hot frag hung in the air, lifting off from one of the battlements. “Anything else? That just looks like one.” He depressed his radio transmitter, “Red Two, Red One—you see anything? My backseat tallies one hit.”
“Red One, Krauts must’ve killed the juice. Lost the music as I pulled the trigger,” His frustrated wingman answered.
“Angel Danger, Red Flight. We are Arizona. At least three hit on target, defenses still operational.”
Primary Afloat Command Plot, USS OKINAWA (LPVN-29)
Gulf of Taranto, Approx. 25 NMI South of Taranto, Kingdom of Italy
Rear Admiral Henry Izikawa, United States Navy (CERFOR)
Commander, Task Force 121 / Commander, Naval, Certain Forces, Europe
2136 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
Admiral Ikizawa looked down at the digital sandtable that stretched out before him. It filled the room like a massive billiards table glowing with symbols and showing the progress of PHALANX’s three component operations—BARDICHE, FRICTION, and AVALANCHE. It was game day, and everyone had come out for the team, but he was displeased as a sea of faces and figures chattered away and milled around the digital plot. PEACH was not just off schedule; it was slipping through their fingers. That would turn a tenuous political situation into something altogether more dire.
General Bernard Montgomery paced along one side, staring down at an insert of the progress of BARDICHE at Taranto as he rubbed his chin. It showed digital IFF tags for the Raider company tasked with seizing the docks intact. “I bloody hate this,” he complained. “I can see everything. I see too much. Awful. Awful—You’ll kill my patience, Izikava.”
That was the fifth different way Monty had butchered Izikawa’s name in the last three hours. “General, respectfully, if you feel the urge to micromanage my landing force, I can put you on an LCAC and give you a fidget spinner.”
“When does ORCHARD’s Corps HQ make landfall?” Montgomery wisely switched subjects, though Ikizawa could already see the General rearing to requisition the CV-30 Rocs after they had deposited the Corps HQ and the FARP team.
“Heavy Metal is ten minutes out from Objective LEMON, sir,” one of the ops ratings answered.
Monty grinned, giddy at the speed of information, “What about the rest of ORCHARD Force?”
“63rd Transpo’ Group is arriving at LEMON now, and the rest of the 52nd Transport Wing is past phase line SUGAR.” The rating pinged markers on the main plot, strings of arrows were crossing the heel of the boot, and some were already at the spur. Most of these carried the supplies that would be needed to keep Ridgeway’s composite corps in the fight in the event that the weather cut off resupply. Even if the weather turned bad, they could run supplies with OLYMPIAN air assets, but Izikawa would rather not burn the flight hours or put irreplaceable assets on the line for milk runs.
“Hell of a mess on that mountain. Do we have night attack available?” The general inquired.
“We don’t, sir. They’re all Winchester—out of ordinance—or engaged.” The Air Ops officer answered, “We do have our reserve and the alert Cougars on the deck, but—”
“We need those for the bloody panzers,” The general surmised. He shook his head. Not to mention that the flak battery they’d missed at Monte Sant’Angelo was still partially active.
The admiral grimaced and turned to PACP’s air operations officer. “Michaelson, how much time does FALSE PROPHET have left on station?”
The young Cert looked up from his console, “About thirty. We lost an hour tanking PEACH Force. They still have full ammo, though…” He knew Izikawa well enough to know what the Gyrene’s Admiral was thinking.
“We’ve got an ELINT ping from Herman Goring at Battipaglia! It's fragmentary, but they’re in pocket,” another of the plot’s operations staff announced to the room. There was a sigh of relief. They had not heard a peep from the Luftwaffe’s armored division all night until now.
“Bloody well time!” A British voice complained.
The admiral scoffed as he turned to his CAG, Captain “STARS” Kennedy. The blond aviator already had a handset wrenched from the console surrounding the main plot up against his ear: “Albie for IFR? Cougars for the Panzers?”
Ikizikawa nodded, “Get that shit rolling. If they have to pull off station to refuel, it’s better than a whole-hog RTB.” He rubbed his chin as he looked at the map, “Where is the relief Rev20 for the Foggia AO?” A runner brought him a bundle of printed dispatches, sending a shiver down Izikawa’s spine—he missed having everything just sent on a tablet.
“Delayed due to a mechanical issue. It won’t be a handoff,” STARS answered grimly.
A figure cut through the crowd and physically moved Hank’s flag aide out of the way “Hank, they’ll need lift up that mountain if we want to keep the dream alive,” Colonel Sandy Serrano, the commander of the 4th Raider Battalion was agitated. It would not be apparent on first inspection, but Izikawa saw the flesh under the usually affable special forces officer's eye twitch.
Izikawa looked Sandy dead in the eye, “Michaelson?”
“Yessir?” The swabbie replied.
“Inform HEAVY METAL they are temporarily detached to 10th Special Forces.”
“Sir, don’t we need approval from Genera—” Izikawa flicked his eyes off of Serrano and focused a cold glare at Lieutenant Michaelson, who got the memo. “Understood, Admiral. I’ll have Comms send a dispatch to General Clark.”
“Sandy, let’s just hope she doesn’t propose anything insane.”
The Raider erupted in cackling laughter, killing all other noise in the plot, leaving only dead, awkward silence in its wake.
Regimental CP, Hangar Two, Amendola Air Base
Amendola, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Major May Locke, United States Marine Corps (CERFOR)
Deputy-Executive Officer, 10th Special Forces Regiment (Combined, Airborne)
2145 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
Colonel Frederick sighed. “That is an insane idea, Major.” With a shaking head, he glared at Locke under the red light of covered lanterns, “The rest of Walker’s battalion up that mountain in those broken helo-copters?” His arms shot up in a familiar burst of exasperation as the droning of radial engines filled the night. “Madness!”
“Sir, I never said which air assets,” Locke stopped Frederick cold, causing him and the rest of the regimental staff to let out a beleaguered collective sigh. “PEACH is on that mountain, so are our men—and OLYMPIAN materiel in flagrante delicto.” The major pointed out of the hangar toward a trio of taxing C-54A Skymasters, “We already have one battalion of the 325th on the ground, and the 2nd Commando Brigade is still on schedule. My god, Fred, we have a battalion landing every ten minutes. We have a free hand, and you know very well what is riding on this mission.” The building shook as a low whine rose above the din of the constant trickle of spluttering and coughing props. Locke smiled.
Perfect timing.
The radio on the table around which the regiment's senior leaders sat crackled to life. Frederick stopped before he could speak and looked forlornly at the box on the table between them. A violent hiss of static, a deluge of crackling gunfire, echoed into the hangar.
Villa Santi, Monte Sant’Angelo
Gargano, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Sergeant James Alsup, United States Army (GENFOR)
I Company, 3rd Battalion, 10th Special Forces Regiment (Combined, Airborne)
2147 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
The roar of the suppressed T60E1 lit the interior of the villa—bathing the dead, dying, and damned in pulsing light and dancing shadow as smoke danced off the barrel and its tired suppressor. The gunner howled curses as the half-mad radio man snapped and started screaming, handset dangling in his paw, “We’re dead! We’re dead! Dead! We’re all going to die!”
The company’s first sergeant lifted the kid up by his webbing and shook him like a mutt as he snatched the handset from him. He tossed the boy aside like an empty burlap sack, “Enough of that shit, son,” he hissed. His words were barely a whisper above the discord. He spoke calmly into the receiver, lost under the hail of gunfire. A rocket cut through the night and detonated. The radioman babbled in tears, a puddle of cloth and kit.
Dark blood pooled on the floorboards as the two orderlies triaged the wounded and whispered silent prayers for the dead. Sergeant Alsup helped the Marine SPADE, a master sergeant, to the stairs. He was the meanest one of the bunch of gravediggers. Alsup could not remember the sergeant’s name as his hands trembled and his mind raced. The SPADE pushed himself onto the stairs and immediately started to check himself for wounds. He groaned as he touched his thigh. The olive drab fabric was dark—it was blood.
The SPADE looked at Alsup, “Sergeant—do you remember the trauma care course?” Alsup nodded. “Good. Then TQ me bro—I’ve shit to do, and I ain’t got time to bleed.” The SPADE removed a tourniquet from his plate carrier and pressed it into Alsup’s hand. “If I pass out, it’s on you, dude.” He started tapping away on the flexible screen on his wrist, “The Boss’ll kill me if I die.” He seemed almost disinterested in his own death.
Alsup didn’t need to hear more. He slung his M2A1 Carbine to one side and started to apply the trauma care he had been taught with shaking hands. The little peashooter was thankfully light, and he knew it could kill, despite what the boys had thought.
The bullet had not struck an artery and gone all the way through. Alsup’s hands were slick with blood, but the grim reaper on their shoulder would not die—at least not from this wound.
The company—rather two troops—had been pushed back to a small villa on the southwestern edge of the town. They had attempted to fight their way into the town after pushing from the alternate DZ—but it was no use. They had been thrown back by a furious counterattack. The Italians were fighting like hellcats with nothing to lose.
There were also Krauts. Lots of Krauts.
Sikorsky MH-53R Nightmare PAVE LOW V, Pizza Rat Stallion, #172334/YK 09
Gargano, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Captain Jeffrey Banks, United States Marine Corps (CERFOR)
Marine Heavy Helicopter Squadron 466
2025 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
Captain Banks's consciousness returned in jerks and spurts, like waking from an unpleasant dream. He thoughtlessly unclipped his harness and flicked up his NODs. He fell forward about a foot and groaned as his gut slammed into the console. “Sam?” He turned and saw the corpse of his friend. Neck twisted and wrung. His body contorted in a final awful pose. “Damn it, Sam.” He whimpered. A voice of sorrow and regret that he could not recognize as his own echoed in his mind. Blood was slick on his forehead. His eyes hurt. Everything hurt. His head pulsed with a pain that made him drowsy. His body moved without much instruction from his clouded mind. Hands reached and found his SERE kit. He opened the cockpit door and took a leap into the dark.
The sky was still lit by not-so-distant flames, and spats of gunfire barked into the night, some far in the distance, some worryingly close. Otherwise, the town was dark. it was quiet, and it was deserted. It didn’t seem like anyone was home—it almost felt like no one had ever lived here. There was something very, very wrong. The briefing had estimated that the population had merely been cordoned off from the convent that had been designated PEACHTREE.
He fell about three feet into a heap. His body was all out of sorts. His right shoulder was probably dislocated, and his left knee was not exactly happy either. The fresh pain was like a cold bucket of water. He instinctually reached for his thigh. He felt and drew his Kel-Tec CP33-derived M26 Personal Defense Weapon System. The braced pistol was chambered in 7.6x31mmK—it was billed as the M1 Carbine for a modern war. A shiver went down his spine. He might just have to test that comparison for himself.
“Movement!” A voice cried out.
Banks turned to face his executioner. He paused mid-movement as he brought the pistol to his shoulder. Since when do Italians sound Canadian?
“Another flyboy is alive!” The same voice corrected his first call.
“Baldree, you said they were both dead,” someone else snarled.
“Skipper? That you?” A third voice beckoned.
“DeLario?” Banks squinted at the face peering down at him from a second-story window. “You alive? Did Jones…”
“I’m here too, sir. Fucked up, but I’m here,” a distant Corporal Jones gruffly answered.
“Did Lee—”
Banks cut off DeLario, “He didn’t.”
“And he’ll be fuckin’ munted too if he stays out there,” The second voice said.
Banks shuffled toward the door of the house his Shitter had smashed through. Sam, why did you have to get fucking killed? Sally will—Fuck. Sally would never know what happened to her little brother. Sally would’ve already buried an empty casket, like all of their families. He tried the big oak door. “It’s locked, gentleman.”
“Baldree, get th’fookin door,” The voice finally registered; it was Cancuk’s colour sergeant—a tough son of a bitch.
At least he’s still alive.
Banks rested his head against the wooden door and took a deep breath.
THU-CRACK. THUMP. THU-CRACK. THUMP. THU-CRACK.
Banks turned toward the muffled crack. The cogs in his brain turned for a moment. He flicked down his NODs and felt sick as he looked underneath the wreck of his PAVE LOW. In faded colors, he saw that church mice were stirring. Figures moved down the street in a wedge formation, lighting up the wreckage of his aircraft with rounds and IR lasers as they advanced down the street without a single concern for who or what might be in the buildings. The finesse was plain to see—they moved with flawless synchronicity. It made him draw a blank, but it was certainly cinematic.
Who are these chucklefucks? He shouldered his PDWS. Thank God I’m a lefty, sorry Sister Irene. He flicked the selector off SAFE. “Sarge, those are our guys?” He asked upstairs.
There was a thunk at the door as Sergeant MacLeod shouted something obscene, his voice cut off by a BLOOP and a long burst from a T60 belt-fed. The figures fell to the cobbles like dropped dolls, crooked limbs canted into the air as the 40-millimeter grenade detonated, and a concerto of singing .276-43 rounds sliced through cloth and flesh. There was a shout to hold fire. It was done and dusted in a blink of an eye.
Banks pushed into the door as it finally swung open, toppling over the slip-of-a-thing Canadian. The captain caught the private with one hand and pulled him upright. The Canuck locked the door and hurried up after Banks, who trudged upstairs. DeLario nearly jumped him, hands full of detcord. Jones was prostrate on the floor with a compound fracture below his knee, along with two less wounded Forcemen and five corpses.
“Good to see you, Jaysohn,” Banks answered the hug with a hand pushing the face of the sergeant away from himself, “You rigging her to blow?” DeLario nodded. “Good. Keep working, we can’t stay here.” The adrenaline was starting to flow. He wasn’t used to getting shot at on the ground—and wasn’t really all that used to getting shot at in the air. “Sergeant, who the fuck were those guys?”
“Fook if I know,” The stocky Canadian was built like a bull affixed with a finely combed walrus moustache. “They aren’t that smart, but they’re mean. We reckon they have the Starlight.”
“I saw IR lasers, so almost certainly, yes—we need to get moving,” He paused, panting slightly, “Where the Hell are we?”
“South side of the place,” Sergeant MacLeod answered. “Radio is busted, but we can hear the gunfire easy enough. Rest of the company are that way.” He pointed east. He pointed out four of his men, “Beaker, Smythe, Lil Mac, and Baldree go recover one of the bodies. Kinney, your team will cover.” The men wordlessly agreed and went about the task. MacLeod and Banks unfurled their printed maps at the same time, and both produced wax pencils almost in unison. “Light,” the sergeant bid, and one of the enlisted enforcement clicked on a red-lensed pen light.
Banks had a working bearing and a marked map. The medic had set his shoulder back into place, which allowed the captain to help DeLario and two Canuck Snake Eaters lace the Shitter with what explosives they had at hand. Jones was still struggling to get their SERE radios to the right channel. The ever-frustrating Sisyphean task of getting OLYMPIAN and PROMETHEAN technology to talk together was almost comforting. God knows they had experience with it. The captain made a little prayer thanking JADC2.
Five or ten minutes passed, and the party returned with a shredded corpse. There was a rumble in the distance, thunder. The unstill night was now muffled by the sound of a gentle rain.
Sergeant Beaker tossed something to Banks, which the captain failed to catch. It jumped right out of his hands and onto the blood-stained carpet. A cold shiver ran down Banks’s spine. AN/PVS-5 night vision goggles rocked on the floor at his feet.
The dead soldier was in all black. He had a steel highcut helmet with rails and a unit insignia that Banks could not recognize alongside the twin thunderbolts that he did. He had a plate carrier and modern webbing. One of the Forcemen held an integrally suppressed FG 42 in his hands.
Banks, patting his sweat-slicked hair that was now free of his flight helmet, shrugged and sighed, “Well, this certainly a development.”
Forward Area Refuelling Point SQUEEZE, Amendola Air Base
Amendola, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Major May Locke, United States Marine Corps (CERFOR)
Deputy-Executive Officer, 10th Special Forces Regiment (Combined, Airborne)
2150 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
The rain pittered and pattered as Major Locke walked across the tarmac toward four resting CV-30D Rocs. The hairs on the back of her neck were rigid, and she felt the eyes staring daggers. She paid them no mind. Not even the rain phased her. Riding out a monsoon in a busted-ass hooch had raised her tolerance a life ago. The FARP crew moved with elegance and speed, a ballet of Gennies and Certs, OD ants in ponchos scurrying in the shadows between the spotlights. They were a machine of flesh and blood—but they were not quiet—a constant stream of curses and orders rolled up like the tide. As soon as another cutting-edge antique touched the tarmac—guided by two AESA radars designed by the pilots’ would-be great-grandchildren—the refueling of another was completed. The C-54s and C-46s didn’t need to refuel and just waited for their turn to take back to the clouds and return from this place of danger.
There was tension in the air. Gennies flying in the dark and the rain was not easy—least of all on a freshly captured airbase a hundred miles behind enemy lines. But everyone kept working.
“You men capable of taking these aircraft up that mountain?” Major General Matthew Ridgeway bade to four sets of Cert pilots crouching on the cargo ramp of the lead CV-30D. The general was in his poncho, two black-fabric stars on his helmet’s cover, and a bridal trail of staff officers in his wake. Everyone was curious about A Certain Force, even if they had a constellation on their shoulders. Ridgeway had agreed to what Frederick and Locke proposed, but he was still uncertain.
“Yes, General, we are capable,” the detachment command rose from his squat and, unfurled to his full height; A face and form familiar to Locke loomed over the parachutist general. “Is the flak still operational?” That was a pointed question. Locke could see the Roc Rider’s rook slide across the verbal chess board. He was positioning himself for a Directive 16(A) rejection.
Clever boy.
“FALSE PROPHET is on tap,” Locke interjected. She tipped her head with a brief smirk, “Lieutenant Colonel Adebayo.”
Five words upturned the Riders' mood in an instant. It was like someone had removed a knife from their throat. The ogre of a man, the CO of Marine Heavy Tiltrotor Squadron 506 (VMH-506), smiled. “Never bet against Hank, eh?”
“Something like that, John,” Locke replied. She turned back toward Frederick and Ridgeway. The general seemed bewildered; Frederick nodded—doing his best to hide a wolfish grin.
“Hell of a way to die, May.” Adebayo said, “But we all gotta die sometime. We’re done fueling in twenty.” He looked down at his pilots, “Any objections?”
“Quoting Army? Addie, that’s some pussy shit,” One aviator, with a visage closer to a pair of worn saddlebags than a man, spat back, “Let’s get this circus on the road.”
Ridgeway leaned over toward Frederick, “They’re actually going to give…”
“She’s a broad, but she’s good at this,” Frederick answered. “Don’t ask how… beyond me.” Locke pretended that she didn’t hear.
“Christ,” Ridgeway looked Locke up and down once more like it was the first time meeting her. He outstretched his hand, “Just what are you?”
Locke accepted the handshake, “A weapon to surpass Metal Gear.”
The General did not ask any more questions. “Give ‘em Hell.” He chuckled awkwardly.
The general and his staff turned back and trotted through the rain back to the main building where they had set up the Corps command post. Frederick and a few Berets remained under the cover of the Roc’s tail, looking up at her. This was her show now.
She raised two fingers to her lips and whistled. The shrill tone pierced the night and the sound of the rain. she shifted tones down, and at once, she had the attention of at least 1500 people. “SNAKE EATERS!” The words flowed sweeter than any litany, and the feet of the men she had trained moved swifter than any gale. “LET’S GO RESCUE A PRINCESS!”
Castello di Monte Sant'Angelo, Monte Sant'Angelo
Monte Sant'Angelo, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Major Tillman von Feuchtersleben, Luftwaffe
Flakgruppe Tillman, Flak-Regiment 22, 1. Flak-Division
2212 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
“These fucking Italians,” the Sonderjäger Stabsfeldwebel growled, “Worth as much as pigshit at a piggery.” Major von Feuchtersleben stood awkwardly alongside the aged Alter Kämpfer as he attempted to strike a match on the butt of his Sturmbüchse fitted with a massive watchmeister scope. “At least in Astrakhan, the Romanians were good at dying. These shitstains can’t even die properly.” He jerked his head in the direction of a wounded Italian Regular being dragged back toward an aide station. The major nodded along as if he agreed, but he just wanted to get this over with so he could return to the comparative safety of his shattered command post.
He had come down from the castle to oversee the deployment of an experimental weapon. Four 27-millimeter cannons with a first-of-its-kind heat sight and advanced fire director. Of course, the heat sight and director had not actually been delivered when they accepted the prototype, but that was not much of a concern now. Two draft horses moved the mount down the dim Italian streets as the blackshirt garrison fired off another set of illumination shells. The 2.7cm Auto-Flak 43 was supposed to be a new standard “close-in defense weapon,” but tonight, it would be blooded as an assault gun.
Some of the Sonderjägers cursed as they snapped up their night glasses, recoiling in pain. The platoon moved in a line down one side of the street. They were all relaxed, almost nonchalant. These were all veterans of the fight against the Bolsheviks—and some were even veterans of the Great War too.
“Two fucking companies left, and they can’t kill a platoon of Americans. So we have to clean up their mess,” The Stabsfeldwebel continued, “Fucking incompetents.” The SS officer at the head of the column raised a palm, and the troops halted. He motioned toward his ear and then upwards. Von Feuchtersleben looked upwards and focused his hearing, but there was nothing—the sound of gunfire was too near and too loud. “Shit,” the soldier muttered.
“What?” The Major asked, only to be hushed by two Sonderjägers.
“Maikäfer,” some whispered.
“What?” They shushed him again, this time violently. Rifles rose into the air; the relaxed men became still and tense—like archers pulling on a drawstring.
He heard it. It was a low buzz, like a fan or a small aeroplane. The Major tilted his head and did his best to figure out the direction of the sound. He saw a bird moving in the mix of flare-light and smoke.
It wasn’t a bird.
Tillman moved to shout an order to bring the gun to bear. However, before his tongue could follow through, the mount was bathed in a circle of green spotlight showering down from the heavens. “Gott im Himmel,” he muttered. The gun started to burn as the horses started to lose control. He saw paint burst into flames and saw metal burst into smoke and wither in front of his eyes. He watched his body and his mind frozen in fear that boiled up from his bones. It was all he could do. He had a sinking feeling that he was now the ant beneath something else’s magnifying glass.
The ammo. Oh.
His thoughts were interrupted as the Maikäfer dropped from above. With a rush of dazzling light, a rocket motor ignited as it sprinted to the earth. It burst into a grey cloud of smoke and fragmentation. The sympathetic detonation of 2.7cm bomb shells filled the street with noise and licks of flame. All of the air from his lungs was ripped out at once. The night was filled with screams as jägers collapsed to the cobbles and dying horses screeched. One horse folded over, its neck ripped open by fragmentation; the other was fighting for its life, blood rushing down its dapple coat. It got free of its tattered yoke and sprinted down the street. The commandos, with all the discipline of a half-mad mob, wildly opened fire into the sky as the green beam disappeared.
The sky above seemed to grow bigger and darker. The city seemed to stop as the shells cooked off and the air filled with the rumbling of engines.
Concussed and night-blind, von Feuchtersleben was yanked through a doorway into a house by one of the commandos as shouts echoed in one ear and out his other. He felt warmth spilling down his arm. He caught one last glimpse at the sky. There were things moving, shifting like scarabs under the flesh. The dreadful column of light poured down from the sky, a sickly pallid green, followed by ribbons of ultramarine lightning. There was something in the clouds, and it had stolen the Thunderbolt from Olympus.
Bell Textron-Lockheed MV-30G White Raven / PAVE PHOENIX, SKINWALKER, ? 93203 / NOAA N99RF
Above Monte Sant’Angelo, Gargano, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Chief Warrant Officer Alleny “SCOOCH” Larenge, United States Aerospace Force (CERFOR)
Section One, Blue Detachment, Aviation Technology Office
2215 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
“Yeah, Guns, we got some squirters. Building with three chimneys at the T junction.”
“Lasing. That them?”
“Yep, you got’em. Reengage.”
Scooch Larenge’s voice was cold and calm. He saw the world in black and white, even if it was 4k. He didn’t feel much as he saw the blurry bolts of moving death zip from the aircraft’s 50-millimeter cannon. He had flown this mission fifty times before, though usually not quite as hectic as this.
The crew was antsy—you could taste it. They had been waiting to get into the action, and they were not going to disappoint.
The single MV-30G was simultaneously prosecuting five targets: one with its onboard 500-kilowatt laser, one with its 120-millimeter automatic NEMO mortar, another with its 50-millimeter revolver cannon, and two more with a swarm of Switchblade Super 600 airborne loitering tactical munitions.
“Crew, can we get an update on that AD?” The co-pilot asked over the shared radio channel.
“One second, Flight.” Captain Bryn took a second and pawed at his console, scanning the mountaintop village. His eyes effortlessly flicked over the battle damage tracker, cross-checking it with the active tags and what the FLIR and SAR were showing on the display. “All identified Triple-A is neutralized. You seeing radar emish, Flight?”
“Negative, Crew. I just don’t want this party bus to go down. Just kill anyone dude with a tube to be safe.”
“Way ahead of you, Flight.” The captain ended his call with an unsettling chuckle.
“These guys are all running for cover…” the ship’s third combat system officer, Marge, muttered over the channel, “What’s SAR-y Charlie showing?”
“MO’ up!” the crewwoman manning the NEMO shouted.
“Uuuuuh, let’s prioritize the Eye-Ties around the friendlies in the two-story building with the three strobes on it.” Captain Bryn answered, “Yeah, let’s smoke those guys.”
Scooch saw movement, “Oh, I got movement, movement. In the white row houses, near the downed Stallion.”
“Yeah, I got it…” Captain Bryn replied, “I see it too. Do not engage. Those could be our guys…” Suddenly, something in the hands of the figures started to flash in infrared, “Oh yeah, that’s our guys.” A second later, the ship’s electro-optical targeting system used its two-way interrogator and confirmed the IR strobe was friendly. It even showed whose strobe it was.
Banks… Banks… Is that Pizza Rat guy?
“Fuck! Ping!” Marge shouted, “Tube! Tube! Tube! Northwest corner of the castle, on single foot mobile.”
That’s a brave dumbfuck.
“Smoke ‘em! Engage! Engage!” Bryn barked as he and Scooch swerved their targeting cameras that way. A figure was running along the wall of the castle with a tube on his shoulder. The CWO watched the 500 kW laser fire up and pulse the figure into two stacks of smoking viscera. There was a sympathetic detonation as the MANPADS’s warhead detonated.
“Crew, Flight—Rockers on schedule, keep your eyes pea—.” He cut himself off mid-sentence, “Launch! Launch! Countermeasures!” The entire aircraft rocked as the pilots unleashed the throttles, and two active decoys and a trail of flares lept free.
“Uh, Boss—that wasn’t a MANPAD,” Scooch said over the intercom. His screen had turned to hell. He switched to the SAR view, and it was filled with noise. “That’s a lot of fuckin’ chaff.”
Bell Textron-Lockheed CV-30D Roc, It’s Always Sunny in Hell, #174198/MI00
Gargano, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Major May Locke, USMC (CERFOR)
Deputy-Executive Officer, 10th Special Forces Regiment (Combined, Airborne)
2215 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
Major Locke loomed over Lieutenant Colonel Adebayo's like an unwelcome parrot. She wanted to catch the view as they were coming in. Monte Sant’Angelo was lit by flickering flames as smoke rose between the buildings and more fire poured down from the PAVE PHOENIX. She patted John on the shoulder and filed back down from the cockpit into the cabin as the light went red. She nodded to Captain Shaw as he spoke to one of his troop commanders.
The men stirred and readied their weapons. There were hushed whispers, nervous looks, and even more nervous japes. These were not the same men who had met Locke with scorn and suspicion in January. They were blooded now, but fighting shocked checkpoint guards is a whole other ballgame than MOUT—at night—against an unexpectedly large and well-equipped enemy force.
The rumble of explosions rolled as FALSE PROPHET pounced on anything that moved. The Germans had gotten a sucker punch, but they would only leave this arena in a body bag. Major Locke would see to it.
The night was turned to half-day as the air over the village was filled with shimmering flakes and burning flares. “False Prophet, this is Heavy Metal Zero. We have enemy chaff in the air. Looks like they’re ready for us,” Adebayo’s voice crackled across the radio as Locke checked her gear. She was a motley mutt of a future that could never be and a past that was not her own. OD Green in vintage cuts with her plate carrier and parts of her old kit, but with more kit and fittings that were the best that the First Arsenal of Democracy could produce. She had one foot in the 1970s and another in the 2040s.
“Rog’ Heavy Metal, we’re in the blind. Set your SADLS to automatic. We’ll counterfire if they shoot. Best we can do at this time.” The PAVE PHONEIX commander’s voice reverberated in the ears of her Common Head And Ear Protection System helmet. CHAEPS—DOD had a sense of humor with that one—was made of a novel blend of polyethylene that gave it black tip protection at 70% of the weight of NG-IHPS.
The gunfire and explosions grew closer.
The rotors began to shift, and most of the Gennies looked like they were going to puke or shit themselves as the wizardry of future engineering willed the quad-rotor Hercules-sized transport to assume its helicopter-like form. There was a flood of movement as the crew pulled the jump doors open, letting a stream of frigid air, and in their place, they swung out a pair of GAU-19/D miniguns. A masked, NOD’d, and leashed crewman readied the guns as a hand came to rest on her shoulder.
“Ma’am, sit the fuck down. Dying in a crash is my job, not yours,” the crew chief—a slender, acne-scarred Latino man in his late 30s—grumbled. Locke knew better than to argue with Addie’s people. It was bad luck and bad form, and she really shouldn’t be standing in the middle of the cabin like a philosophizing idiot.
“Footmobiles, ten o’clock low—moving onto the roof with the greenhouse,” the co-pilot said over the intercom. “Yeah, those aren’t ours—smoke ‘em.” The left door gunner opened fire first, then the right, and then the gunners from the three other transports. From a view out the escape hatch window, she could just make out rivers of tracers pouring down through the spitting rain.
The return fire came almost immediately—but—the cavalry had arrived.
Villa Santi, Monte Sant’Angelo
Gargano, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Sergeant James Alsup, United States Army (GENFOR)
1st Troop, I Company, 3rd Battalion, 10th Special Forces Regiment (Combined, Airborne)
2215 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
Rain wasn’t the only thing falling.
A group of Italian soldiers disappeared underneath a burst of smoke and fire. The pattern of small explosions occurred all at once. The flash of light made Sergeant Alsup wince as his view of the world went white. The Eye-Ties were throwing all they had—even after their mortars had been silenced and one of their companies had been cut to ribbons. Three, maybe four, machine guns nested in the windows of the core village were spitting streams of curses in 6.5 Carcano. 2nd Troop had seen Blackshirts with a German kit—identifiable by their helmets—but these guys were regulars and totally outmatched.
The villa was smashed, large portions of the walls had been smashed open, and nearly everything with a line of sight to the Italians was pockmarked by a bullethole. They were running low on ammunition, but the half-company’s fighting positions were still intact. Alsup was lying flat on the kitchen’s tile floor, looking through a hole blasted through the brick wall by a Panzerfaust. Alsup saw the world in the grainy grey-green tint of his Starlight goggles. He fired one round at a time toward movement and at the enemy machine guns. He stopped firing as he saw a mortar shell drop from the sky and turn the end of a rowhouse into a smoking ruin and a sea of splinters screaming into the night sky that suddenly grew red-orange.
Long strings of red-orange flares filled the night along with clouds of shimmering metal. Tracers whipped through the air in a crisscrossing mess of color and violence, and then yet another color arrived, rivers of ultramarine blue cutting down from the sky like lines of light. The rhythmic thumping of rotor blades reverberated through everything—like the heartbeat of the world. One MG nest fell silent. Then another. Movement in the shadows stopped. The attack lifted like a passing storm.
“The Hell?” Someone shouted, with a tenor to the voice that screamed that he was half deaf, “Did we whip the bastards?”
“Shuddup, Wilson,” Captain Daugherty shouted back. “That’s our signal, boys! Angus, get to Rodgers and tell him to get ready to move his troop.” Alsup turned over on his belly and looked in the direction of the CO’s voice, confused. “We need to redivvy our ammo. I want us ready to move out in five.” The skipper slinked along the line in a crouched walk, whispering and giving out encouragement. “Jim, how much ammo do you have?” Daughtery asked when he finally got Alsup.
“I got half a mag of .23 in the rifle and one spare, and two smoke, and a frag,” Alsup answered.
Daughtery nodded and produced two more mags of .23-43 and a pineapple hand grenade, “Need water? How are you holding up?”
“Be better once we get off this mountain, Cap.”
“We’re getting there, Jim. We’re getting there.”
Parrocchia Santa Maria del Carmine, Monte Sant’Angelo
Gargano, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Major Tillman von Feuchtersleben, Luftwaffe
Flakgruppe Tillman, Flak-Regiment 22, 1. Flak-Division
2217 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
The church was buzzing with frantic activity. Men carried arms and ammunition, including their last few Fliegerfaust rockets, down into the crypt—and the tunnels that had been created for this purpose. The foundation shook, and dust from the rafters as another massive explosion rocked the village. Tillman sat awkwardly, his hands would not stop vibrating. He felt blood on his face and was unsure if it was his own or someone else. His command was gone. He was a husk watching a one-sided screaming match.
“TUTTO MIO BATTALIOGNE!” The Tenente Colonnello was screaming at the very top of his lungs. His battalion was considered sufficiently loyal to be officially signed to the mission, but they were still disposable—not that he or his men had been told of that. His face was bright red, and his eyes were bulging. “PORCO STRONZO!”
“You are relieved,” Standartenführer Skorzeny replied coldly. The Italian didn’t need to wait for the translation and lunged at the Standartenführer. One of the spähjäger caught the officer by the scruff of his neck and slammed his face down onto the table, blood splattered across the map of Foggia. The praetorian pressed a rectangular, plastic-framed pistol to the base of the officer’s neck. Skorzeny growled as the room fell silent. The other Italians had moved their hands to their weapons.
“Porco Madonna—questo stronzo…” The Black Prince had not flinched, nor had his frogmen adjutants. “Calmati.” He shook his head, “Ora…” He jerked his head to the left, and the jäger let go of the army officer. Who straightened out just in time to be shot by the Black Prince. The corpses collapsed onto the table but slid backward to the ground, landing with a wet thump.
The commander of the I Bersaglieri CC.NN Battalion “M” nodded energetically, “Si.”
“Now…” Skorzeny started again, his voice bristling with annoyance, as he turned and looked toward the passenger at the crypt, “Move OAK to the alternate location. And send the signal.”
An RVO Elektromaschinenschreiberp-Kampfpionier sat his station with a mass of radio and electronics. His fingers danced and unleashed a brief symphony of clicks and clacks.
Skorzeny rapped his knuckles on the blood-soaked table, “The pyres are lit. The fires will rage. Let us begin. Let us kill them all and be done with it.”
LZ Dog, East of Cimitero Comunale, Monte Sant’Angelo
Gargano, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Major May Locke, United States Marine Corps (CERFOR)
Deputy-Executive Officer, 10th Special Forces Regiment (Combined, Airborne)
2217 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
The CV-30D landed with a thunk, rocking the entire aircraft. The cabin light flipped green, and the company dismounted out both jump doors and the rear ramp. It took thirty-five painful seconds for the Roc to empty out. The T506 engines’ low rumble rose to a deafening roar as they pushed their throttles to unleash their total 15,750 horsepower. The massive blades summoned a gale in the soft rain.
The battalion waited, lying on the low grass and rocks—waiting for a storm of lead to reach out through the rain. Tracers from distant gunfire bounced into the sky, and the occasional illumination flare rose into the night. However, the only thing Locke could hear was the sound of the trickling rain.
Locke rose from the ground like a phantom, making no sound. With the flick of one hand, she waved the entire battalion forward. They crept forward with a practiced bounding movement. Jingling gunners and A-Gs rustling forward with their T60s and belts of steel-cased ammo.
With another wordless gesture, Locke and the Regimental Reconnaissance Company split off through the cemetery. She lowered her CATO mask. The panoramic display inside the spider-eyed visor gave her vision in muted colors and neon highlights. Her men still trembled in amazement at equipment like PVS-7 while she was seeing the world with a digital heads-up display. Funny how things work out.
They moved in the shadows of dozens of mausoleums, homes to the dead in all sorts of shades and shapes. The rain kept falling, and the night was filled with the rustling of weapons and men. Whispers drifted between their ears as they moved ever forward. Death could be around any corner, but they still had yet to be welcomed.
As they cleared the cemetery, Locke froze. The sky glowed, and the village they had flown over was gone. Fire reached up toward the sky in flickering towers of orange, vomiting clouds of black smoke. White phosphorus, glowing white hot, drifted down like snow made of falling stars. Two-tone waves of grey smoke rolled forward from every street and alley, dipping and shifting in the wind and the rain. Half of the mass slithered on the ground, heavier than air, two feet deep—with another layer floating like cream on top. The sight made Locke sick to her stomach. A hundred memories flickered past her mind’s eye. Her heart wrenched as she thought of the wife she had left behind and the future they had lost. Flakes of debris and ashes flitted through the air above it. Her hand went to a pouch on her hip. She popped the tab and grabbed the contents.
The Forcemen, lit by orange flame, stopped. The light showed on their faces, ones covered in war paint so they did not gleam with the natural oils of humans but the stony-faced determination of soldiers. She felt eyes turn toward her as she removed the lower half of her CHAEPS, “Masks on!” A dozen noncoms and officers echoed her command, and three hundred men moved to grab the respirators from their pouches. Locke affixed the mandible armor and its respirator to her helmet. There was a hiss as the seal molded to her face and the pressure lock former. She took one step forward, then two. She was consumed by the smoke. The Forcemen followed her.
This changed nothing. The clock was still ticking.
Hell had come to Monte Sant’Angelo. It would not save the monsters dwelling here from the Black Devils. If they wished to die in the dark amongst ash and cinder, she would happily oblige.
“D’Antonio!” She hissed back at the column of olive-drab soldiers pressed against the sides of the street. The RTO trundled up to her, his puppy-dog face concealed beneath an M50 gasmask. “You on the battalion net?” He nodded. “Okay, gimme the stick.” She grabbed the receiver and hit transmit, violent explosion of static stung her ear. She called out to nothing. “Fuck! It’s fucked.” She whispered. She turned toward Shaw, at the back of the column on the other side of the street, “Shaw, your radio dead?”
“What!?” he replied too loud, overestimating how much his mask would muffle his voice.
“Is! Your! Radio! Jammed!” Locke fired back as the Forcemen nervously looked around, expecting a whole regiment of Italians to jump out of every opening.
“Oh,” he muttered and looked at his radioman, who was already working on the backpack-sized long-range. He said something that Locke didn’t catch.
The Corporal slashed his thumb across his throat, “Shit-bricked.”
Locke growled and powered up her wrist computer. The battery was doing alright, but they had all learned the hard way that a glowing wrist tended to make Certs easy to spot, and the Wehrmacht was always eager to collect the standing bounty for their heads. 10,000 Reichsmarks was a lot of money, after all. The first thing that she saw was a familiar warning bubble. Shit. They were getting jammed, and jammed by something that was wide-spectrum and high-powered. It had to be OLYMPIAN; of course, it was. They must’ve prepared for a movement by a Cert force.
It was impossible to see more than a few feet through the smoke. Locke switched her CATO mask to pure thermal and couldn’t see anything either. The smoke was clearly two layers, one soup, dense and ever-sinking toward the ground, and the other much more normal ashen fog. Both were clearly persistent. Too clever by half. No one would be able to see in this shit—not Gerry and not any eyes in the sky.
Locke cursed to herself and waved the column forward. She linked up with Shaw, and they decided to send runners to J and K Company. They would continue for Objective PEACHTREE. God willing, I Company would be able to link up with J Company and provide the battalion with rear area security.
“What if they come around us?” Shaw asked, fecklessly fanning smoke off the folded map in his hand.
Locke shrugged, “It’ll be a firefight.”
Shaw looked around toward the flames visible above the roofs, “Yeah, sure.”
The runners disappeared into the smoke, and the recce company moved forward. The lead troop had disappeared in the grey. The noise of the flames, the rain, and the hissing combination of the two elemental forces hid the sounds of their movement. There was just the soft crunching of boots on cobblestones like a broken metronome. They followed curved and jagged roads lined by empty houses. There was no one here. They kept going forward; there were only about 300 meters to PEACHTREE.
The machine guns opened fire first, the horrible buzzsaw wine of an MG 42. The company dropped to the ground into the soup; rifles leveled toward the direction of the contact. The lead troop returned fire. The noise of suppressed rifles and machine guns filled the street, punctuated by bloop tubes and LAWs. Bursts of light clawed through the smothering smoke and ash.
“Panzerfaust!” someone up ahead shouted, followed by a tremendous rush of noise as a rocket came screaming out of the smoke, parting it like a knife. It slammed into the side of a rowhouse behind them and exploded. The light did its best to punch through the layers of grey-orange smoke. Locke waved Shaw forward; the battalion command team she had commandeered stayed with her, and a small security detachment and the battalion FO/TAC party. Locke could barely see the tracers flitting back and forth like blaster bolts. They shifted the CP out of the way to a better position.
“This some Geonosis, bullshit,” she murmured to herself.
They were camped in an alley, Locke at the mouth looking down the street while squatting behind stairs leading up the entrance. She barely flinched as a suppressed full-power rifle went off overhead without any warning. The round streaked down the street into the smoke, chasing after a phantom Forceman. Locke’s hand went up to tell her command party to hold; she looked up and saw a shrouded barrel hanging over the ledge. With a few jerks of her head, her soldiers quietly readied their weapons—a mix of small arms, plus a couple of M79 grenade launchers and a single T60—as the gunman in the window complained under his breath in German.
D’Antiono, Locke, and four others wordlessly readied fragmentation grenades—just before the RTO yanked the pin from the baseball-shaped M27 grenade, Locke stopped him. She drew her last remaining M84 flashbang, wiggled it at the Forcemen, and pointed to herself. They nodded. She pulled the pin.
“Was?” The voice in the window murmured.
Locke waited for a second before chucking into the building. It went off, filling the room with light and noise. Her erstwhile students rose and hurled or rolled half a dozen frags into the structure.
“MILLER!” Locke cried to her leader of the battalion HQ’s security element, “STACK AND—” The grenades went off, blowing out the windows and sending curtains and grey-brown smoke out with a cloud of shrapnel and splinters. He got the memo, and a team of pipe hitters rolled up to the entrance. They blew the door off its hinges with a shorty shotty and rolled in a couple of grenades for good measure. The point man was armed with a cutdown M10 FAL, something that violated even the looser regs that Locke had suggested for the Regiment—so it's not like they’d need to use flashbangs when they had automatic dispenser.
“Bennet, Profroek,” she hissed at the huddle of olive-drab porcupines. Get moving, find Shaw, and tell him we have Germans. It looks like they’re special forces t—” The XO of the 2nd Battalion shot her an angry glare. “No fuckin’ Kraut regular has a semi- and a reflex suppressor, Bourne.” The Canadian nodded, stood up straight, and waved forward to bring a scratch fireteam into the building. She grabbed his arm, “Secure the first floor and then torch it. Don’t have the time or men for distractions, understand?”
“Crystal, sir.”
She patted him on the shoulder, “Go get ‘em, Tiger.”
Primary Afloat Command Plot, USS OKINAWA (LPVN-29)
Gulf of Taranto, Approx. 25 NMI South of Taranto, Kingdom of Italy
Rear Admiral Henry Izikawa, United States Navy (CERFOR)
Commander, Task Force 121 / Commander, Naval, Certain Forces, Europe
2230 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
The images emblazoned on the floor-to-ceiling LED screen were hard to parse; there was just so much smoke and fire. The rating managing the display fecklessly swapped between vision modes—and it was ironically the most clear without thermals. Monty was pacing ruthlessly up and down along the main plot.
“Can’t we just—” The British general started.
Izikawa cut him off, “No.” The Gennies’ heads once more collectively snapped toward the Sanei two-star. Monty was rearing to leap down his throat, but Hank continued to speak, “As I have said previously, it is my practice not to override commanders in the field unless or until they are making a clear mistake that endangers the operation or I possess information that they do not. Neither of those requirements are met. We are in the dark. They are jammed. General Ridgeway is deploying the Green Beret’s 1st Battalion with assets of the Certain Forces. I would remind you that FRICTION is his ballgame—unless and until I get a phone call from Oran, I will trust his judgment.”
“How—”
Izikawa cut Montgomery off again as he rose to his feet. His stark voice filled every corner of the room. Every word annunciated with force. “General Montgomery, you have no operational authority over my landing force. I report directly to AFHQ and Admiral Kaine. You are not the JFC here, sir.” His voice was filled with disdain. He had had enough of Montgomery for a few lifetimes. “I might only have two stars on my shoulders, sir, but I can still drop the sky on you, General.” He sat back down, “Now, I have three invasions to assist. This conversation is over. I will generously forget about it unless you would like to waste more of our time.”
Montgomery turned away from Hank. “How gracious of you, sir,” he scoffed and audibly rolled his eyes. “I will report this indiscretion to my government.”
“Goosefucker,” Hank mumbled under his breath. I oughta Worldstar the motherfucker. Where the fuck is Chucky Cheese when you need him? He turned toward one of his staff, “Spectrum, do we have any idea what kind of jamming that is?”
“It-it’s the same footprint as our INDIGO NIGHTMARE interdictor sets, but roughly forty-percent the effective strength,” The bespectacled twenty-something petty officer responded nervously.
Hank ran a hand through his hair, “They have anything that can punch through the noise?”
“You could mod a PRC-200 to spoof the jammer into thinking a repeated signal burst was friendly, but that would depend on the jamming unit still having STANAG 8563 anti-fratricidal jamming capes, which is a big if. And it would require crawling into the BIOS of the two-hundo.”
Izikawa looked at his console’s display. His eye lingered on the symbol for 4th Raiders, now with Darby Force and 3/1 Marine. “Well, let’s hope that the Spade with 10th SFR knows their way around a rootkit.”
Villa del Sole Nascente, Monte Sant’Angelo
Gargano, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Major May Locke, United States Marine Corps (CERFOR)
Deputy-Executive Officer, 10th Special Forces Regiment (Combined, Airborne)
2300 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
Locke helped the Canadian Forceman drag a wounded soldier inside, “Hey, Bricky, I need you to finish with the bullshit and start transmitting.” She growled at Master Sergeant Hannover “Bricky” Brzezinski, who was currently guts deep into their sole AN/PRC-200 long-range mesh-net radio.
“Doing my best. This isn’t exactly like cutting a NewTok,” he spat back as he tapped away on his wrist computer with a bandaged hand as Locke and the Canadian brought the wounded soldier to the medics. “But I’m close.”
Phrasing.
The battle raged outside the apartment they had commandeered as their new CP. Tracers raced through orange-hue smoke. Muzzle flashes could hardly be seen, masked by polluted air. They had pushed forward and regrouped with I Company without any friendly fire. However, there was a lot—lot—more than just a battalion of Italians and some Gucci Kraut flak. They were hemmed in by at least a battalion of German-kitted Italian-speaking fighters who seemed to know what they were doing and enough pre-sighted machine gun nests to make god weep. Her entire battalion was committed, save for a pair of spent troops covering their asses.
Comms were still down—and they weren’t coming back until they took down that jammer, which they only had a rough idea of where it was located. But today, good enough was, in fact, good enough if they could get a message back to Task Force 121. Every minute they fought this battle in the dark was another minute that the enemy force could use to maneuver against them. She didn’t have the men, but XVIII Corps would know something was wrong and would send reinforcements—especially since the MV-30 had seen everything.
Locke hated this feeling of helplessness. She had no more cards left to play, save for hurling her command element and exhausted walking wounded into the fray. She felt the smoke all around her, flowing in the windows as the fires continued to rage. They were not keeping to the schedule—not at all.
“Got it!” Bricky shouted. “I think,” he chuckled awkwardly, “Only one way to find out.”
“Only one way to find out,” Locke repeated back at him, smiling. “Mackensy, I need a grid reference for that fuckin bank with all the gun nests!”
God has a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.
Combat Bridge, USS LONG BEACH (CSGN-42)
Gulf of Salerno, Approx. 30 NMI Southeast of Naples, Kingdom of Italy
Rear Admiral Jeduthun MacGregor, United States Navy (CERFOR)
Commander, Task Force 123 / Commander, Surface Action Group Seven
2303 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
“FLASH! FLASH! JUMPBALL.” One of the Combined CIC-Bridge crew operators shouted. “Designator SNAKE EATER FIVE DELTA. Waiting for confirmation and authentication.” The ensign cut himself off, “Signal from One-Two-One Actual— ‘Jumpball Flash received at 2303 Lima is authentic, accurate, and time-sensitive. Priority One. Prosecute immediately.’”
“Tarnations,” the baritone voice of Rear Admiral Jed MacGregor answered. He looked around, “We’ll let's see.” He tapped his tablet awake and smiled at an ABAB wallpaper before tapping through to the message. It was a text request for a fire mission, and a danger close one at that. MacGregor unveiled a toothy grin before hurling thunder from his lungs: “CRYSTAL PALACE!”
“Set conditions Crystal Palace, aye,” the compartment’s TAO replied. A moment later, three-quarters-inch HY-200 Natick Plates jutted up, covering the bridge windows and thrusting the nerve center of Long Beach into darkness. The cavernous space was, for a moment, only lit by the dozens of screens that filled it before the LED displays matrix came alive, revealing the night sky beyond the best spark plasma sinistered high entropy alloy that Pennsylvania—of 2035—could produce.
“FIRE MISSION! TEN ROUNDS! TWELVE INCH! RAPID FIRE!”
Banco Monte, Monte Sant’Angelo
Gargano, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Major Tillman von Feuchtersleben, Luftwaffe
Flakgruppe Tillman, Flak-Regiment 22, 1. Flak-Division
2305 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
“FALL BACK!” The American officer's voice was clear through the smoke: “GET BACK! GET DOWN! PULL IT BACK!” Major Tillman did not fully comprehend the words but understood the intent, even as a hellish fusillade of gunfire tore through their hellish surroundings. He coughed through the damped rag around his mouth—his gas mask having been destroyed along with most of his personal belongings.
Someone shouted something in Italian, and a cheer went up from the M Battalion blackshirts. One of the men, an ox of a man, picked up his MG 42 and started firing it from the hip as he waved forward and shouted encouragements.
They did not even hear the whistling before the first round impacted. Tillman did not even understand what was happening as he was wrenched off his feet and flung across the room, slamming spine first into a doorframe. He vomited blood into his face mask as every ounce of air was pulled from his lungs, and the building fell down around him.
Scheiß.
Bell Textron-Lockheed MV-30G White Raven / PAVE PHOENIX, SKINWALKER, ? 93203 / NOAA N99RF
Above Monte Sant’Angelo, Gargano, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Chief Warrant Officer Alleny “SCOOCH” Larenge, United States Aerospace Force (CERFOR)
Section One, Blue Detachment, Aviation Technology Office
2305 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
“Goddamn,” Colonel Frederick looked at the display, slack-jawed. Another 12-inch HC round from Long Beach came down from the night sky like a burning star and disappeared into the smoke for a moment before detonating, sending debris and smoke spinning into the air. The blast wave was great enough to displace the persistent floating sludge like a puddle. The ripples were clear through the smoke.
FALSE PROPHET had returned on station after tanking and picking up a regimental command element from Amendola. They were itching for a fight.
They had barely said anything after the jamming hit. They had tried to find the transmitter without luck and had to pull off station. They were certain they were leaving those soldiers to die.
It seemed like Snake Eaters didn’t die easy—across time.
Comms shouted with a mix of anger and excitement, “WIDE-SPEC SPOOFER IS DOWN! CLEAR-WATER!” His voice changed at the drop of a hat, “All Snake Eater Elements, this is False Prophet. One times MV-30 Golf orbiting at 7000. Armed with 1-1-0-0 rounds 50-mike-mike, 6-0 rounds 120-mike-mike, Buzzards, and JAGM. Playtime is One-Eight-Zero. Available for tasking. Be advised Python is en route, twenty-mikes.”
Two minutes later, the radio crackled alive, and a distorted but reassuringly familiar voice answered back as more shells rained down into the flitting smoke and hellmire.
Villa del Sole Nascente, Monte Sant’Angelo
Gargano, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
Major May Locke, United States Marine Corps (CERFOR)
Deputy-Executive Officer, 10th Special Forces Regiment (Combined, Airborne)
2308 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
“FALSE PROPHET, THIS IS SNAKE EATER FIVE DELTA.” Locke shouted in the receiver as the battle raged all around her, “PING IS LIVE ON MY POS. FIRE MISSION. DEADLIGHT DANGER CLOSE. ONE-FIVE-ZERO METERS AT 3-0-7 DEGREES. TROOPS IN COVER, GREY STONE BUILDING MARKED WITH A BLUE FLARE. I NEED YOU TO DROP THE SKY ON THOSE FUCKERS!”
She peeked out the window, her head barely peeking over the sill. The fires were growing more uncontrolled, the air was thin of oxygen and thick with clods of ash. Machine gun fire echoed every which way, a confused melee unfolding all around them. They had broken the back of the Fascisti special forces just after one of the blackshirt companies had come charging out of the smoke with bugles blaring, faces covered in dampened cloth. Blackened Banditos in the dark now lined the cobblestone streets and the main plaza.
“Roger, Snake Eater—we’re acquiring the target. Stone building with the blue flare.” The gunship commo echoed back at her.
“Watch your fire Prophet. Don’t you go killing any of my boys.” She growled, “I’m handing you off to my FO/TACs. God forgive me for this, but I owe you Aero fucks a beer.”
“Make it a case, ma’am,” False Prophet answered back as a 120mm mortar shell dropped from the sky and shattered the fortified butcher shop, a hurricane of 50mm shells following in its wake.
She thrust the PRC-200 receiver into the hands of the battalion’s senior FO/TAC—a recent addition from the training course in Lompoc. They were all sharp, but they weren’t quite one of hers. With comms restored, she had put the battalion into motion. They had been held up for too long. She would trust Bourne to manage the fight. He just needed to keep things together, which was well within his ability—plus, he wasn’t a chud like Walker.
“D’Antonio, let’s go get ourselves killed,” she chimed in a voice too sweet for the words it beckoned forth into the world.
“Ma’am?” The RTO spluttered back; he chased after her as she hurried down the stairs to the ground floor.
With a click and hiss, she removed her mask and mandible armor as she raised her fingerless glove to her lips. She whistled. That clarion call was heard over the din. The confused Forcemen looked back at her. She thundered, taking gulps of poisoned air; it felt like every breath was a hundred unfiltered cigs—she was lucky if it was just that, “BAYONETS! BAYONETS!” The cry went up, and her order flowed from man to man, from lips shouting under gas masks. She closed her own mask and shouted, “COME ON YOU SONS’A’BITCHES, I AIN’T WAITING TO BURN IN HELL! FOLLOW ME!” The small speakers in the mandible armor boosted and distorted her voice. It sounded less like her and more like Dark Galadriel—which was hardly a bad thing.
She sprinted forward. For a moment, she could only hear her own breathing, her own footfalls. She dared not look back and be faced with the reality that she had built the relationship she believed she had with her men.
“Well, don’t let the Broad die alone!” A gruff voice growled and called out to those around.
Locke moved like a panther, her feet barely touching the ground. The servos in her warrior-web mobility exo-rig whined every so softly, like a mewling kitten. She cut a path through the smoke, gash through soup-smoke in her wake. The distant orange hues grew more and more defined as she hauled ass across the plaza. Where there ought to be a building, there was only a crater and cacophony of shattered timbers and detritus.
Her HUD pinged movement. The last thing two Blackshirts saw was a faceless figure standing amongst greys and orange with a rifle in her hand. She put two in the one who was standing and one into the wounded man he was helping as he went for his sidearm. The standing one folded in half and slumped to the ground. The wounded one writhed for a moment, shrieked, and then stopped moving. She put one more into each of them. Memories of an IJA suicider on Cactus were still fresh in her mind.
She heard movement behind her, and her electronic ears flagged it on the HUD; she turned to one side and swung her body toward the threat. Corporal D’Antonio and a dozen Forcemen came charging out of the mist with bayonets fixed and rifles ready. The rest of the troop came through the smoke, step by step, revealing themselves, cold and calm—despite their fiery environs.
Locke took a knee alongside the troop captain, “Essig, take your One Element down these row houses, unhinge whatever’s left of the Blackshirts. Your Two Element will stay here, cover your asses, and guide in the rest of Romeo. Once enough of Recce’s here—they’ll join you. When you link up with Jig, lock it down on this side, okay? Got it?” Essig nodded.
Shaw and another platoon of Special Forces came moving through the smoke, “Shaw, we’re taking that convent—now.”
“Yes, ma’am. About bloody time.”
“Indeed.” She rose from one knee, “Box it in and break it down. We’re going through that wall.” She pointed to the side of a building.
The half-company dispersed to their objectives. Shaw stopped Locke, '“May, are you quite sure about—”
“Sometimes you need to lead from the front. I’m not a full bird, after all. Got to live a little while I still can, John,” she replied with a smile.
“Very well, ma’am,” Shaw dutifully answered, off-put by her smile and her demeanor. Even after kicking the ass of every officer in the Regiment, they still thought she was a flower to protect—or perhaps he just didn’t want her to get his men killed.
The air stirred with crackling fire, drizzling, and the dropping of bodies. The entire regiment had been drilled and drilled and drilled again in kill house after kill house. They were, without a doubt, the best MOUT troops trained on this side of the shift, and they were showing it. They had been outnumbered at least three to one and held their own.
A knock-off Strela-2 popped and swooshed into the night sky, only to be swatted out of the sky by a laser. Whoever had fired it was then on the receiving end of a deluge of 50-mike-mike fused, raining down shrapnel like iron hail.
This was a rush job. They didn’t have a proper cordon, but they didn’t have the time to spare. At least PEACHTREE wasn’t actively on fire. Locke watched three sappers wire up the shaped charges and a reem of detcord against the wall that was certainly older than the United States of America. They looked up to her as they finished their work. Down the road, a dead Italian tumbled backward out of a third-story window and splattered on the ground. The entry force snapped its head toward the scene, already tensing up for the breach.
“Just blow the fuckin’ thing already,” Locke ordered coldly.
She tucked behind a piece of broken wall in what used to be a bathroom with the sappers. The senior sapper pressed the detonator, and a little jolt of electricity flowed down into the soup. A column of white-grey smoke exploded into the night, and the entry team hurled flashbangs into the newly blasted entrance.
“Doors are for pussies,” one of the sappers proudly announced before remembering the Major. “You’re not a pussy, ma’am.”
“Your vote of confidence is appreciated, Tech,” she said as she joined the stack and rolled into the compound. There were no lights. Even the oil lamps had been snuffed out. The entry teams had their starlight scopes—but those would only help in so much as there was some natural light to magnify, and they weren’t going to light themselves up with IR illuminators with NOD-equipped Nazis; Locke did not have the same limitations. Her Combined Advanced Tactical Optics had been optimized for zero natural light environments—crawling through sewers and bunkers, real megacity fighting.
They had breached into an empty storeroom and immediately fanned out through a few more rooms—all deserted—before reaching a courtyard. Locke was pleased as she watched the Forcemen cut pies like real soldiers. They were a little sloppy but still a far cry from where she found them. Still, she missed her Raiders. She snapped herself back to reality as she watched a stack blow the hinges of a door and breach the main church building.
The first three men entered, and someone opened up a bottle of undiluted hellfire. An absolute deluge of automatic gunfire ripped out as a dozen guns went full auto all at once.
One of the lead men shouted, “Flash, Flash! I need a flash! Krauts 270!”
Another gunfight started in another portion of the complex.
Three flashbangs came sailing through the doorway a moment later. The rest of the breach team followed and unloaded with everything they had. Locke followed suit. The convent’s chapel was now in the process of a very thorough and rapid remodeling as two sections of German special forces—who had been lying in ambush for an entry from the front—turned their fury on the unexpected direction of their visitors.
One of the Germans staggered backward, trying to take off his NODs, and was shot by Locke and about three other Forcemen. His tattered corpse tumbled over a pew. The Germans were firing blindly—probably literally so. She domed two before a wounded German hit something, and a dozen floodlights filled the chamber with overwhelming white light as pea-soup slipped in from the open door and bullet holes. The light blinded both the Forcemen and the Super Krauts—but not Locke. Her CATOs auto-gated and flipped to pure thermals. She dropped staggering, desperate black-clad fighters as they struggled to find their footing and come to their senses.
Her M20 ESC went click after she put three into one, trying to crawl between the pews. She calmly reloaded the rifle as one of them staggered forward with a knife. She put one in his head and another in his groin.
By the time the breaching team came to their senses and more Forcemen joined them, Locke was doubling-taping SS corpses. The Forcemen secured the room, turned off the lights, and turned on their IR illuminators. She looked down at the thunderbolts and thought about raising the black flag, but the 10th Special Forces had already seen the War Refugee Board video briefing—the BLACKRIBBON one.
They would do it on their own.
“Williamson,” Locke called out for this recce troop’s officer.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Make sure we get a few survivors. I think OSS will be mighty curious about how these boys are trained and equipped.” She nudged one of the corpses before picking up an integrally suppressed MP5 look-a-like—or maybe it would be whatever the hell the shorty G3 was called. She checked the mag, and it was in some kind of modified 8mm Kurz, a knockoff .300 Blackout. “What a bunch of rachet shit, man.”
“Ma’am?” Williamson asked, confused.
“Not too many, though,” she added nonchalantly. She walked past him and rested a hand on his shoulder. “We don’t have facilities to accept them all,” she said, voice cold as ice. She did appreciate that those who did not hate her guts were scared of her.
The shouts of “Clear!” beckoned forth from across the convent.
A few minutes later, a voice from the basement shouted, “Major! You’re going to want to see this.”
She followed the voice and stepped down the darkened stairwell. Locke immediately saw why her attention was needed. The Forcemen were in the process of freeing the hostages. But are these the right hostages?
“Who are these people?”
“Dunno, ma’am,” the technical sergeant said. “Don’t look like principals, though.”
“I’d agree,” she answered before turning around. “D’Antonio!” She shouted up the stairwell. The RTO came running like a faithful puppy. “Who are these people?”
He relayed her question and exchanged a few sentences with an older man, “This guy is the uh… senior butler? These are help, some retainers? I’d guess that’s what you’d call ‘em.”
“PEACH here?” She asked, already knowing the answer.
“No, ma’am. They got moved a little while ago, not sure how long, though.”
She grumbled incoherently before joking aloud, “Our fuckin’ princess is in another castle.” She thought that was cute, but D’Antonio nor any of the Forcemen just gave her a very familiar confused glare.
“Do you think they moved them to the castle, or is this another uh refer—”
“Yes, and shut up. Gimme the mic.” She accepted the stick as she tapped her wrist computer awake and panned around the map of Mont Sant’Angelo.
“They say the Black Prince took PEACH with a German with a scar on his face and a lot of masked Germans and Blackshirt frogmen.”
“Oh, so it’s two messy bitches who love drama… Fuck me sideways.” She growled at D’Antonio. “Thank them for being cooperative and that we’ll get them and their employer to safety.” She exhaled as she flicked around the map, “Where the fuck would I hide a short king and 30 HVTs—” she groaned. It was too fucking obvious, “Hey, Mikey, wanna meet your namesake?”
“My great uncle?” The RTO answered, “But he’s from Tuscany—and he’s dead.”
Santuario di San Michele Arcangelo, Monte Sant’Angelo
Gargano, Province of Foggia, Kingdom of Italy
HRH Vittorio Emanuele Ferdinando Maria Gennaro di Savoia
Re d'Italia, Imperatore d'Etiopia, Re Degli Albanesi
2344 Local Time, SEPT 12, 1943
“Mon petit roi, at least we die together,” his wife Elena tried to comfort the King as a gunbattle raged over their heads. He watched as one of the frogmen who lined the sanctuary tightened the grips on his German submachine gun. Yes, we’re going to die like the Romanovs. These bastards. He tightened his small hand into an equally small fist.
Castellano was dead, blood seeping from the bullet holes in his head. Marshall Badoglio was bleeding from a bullet to the gut and would surely die soon—he had been mistreated enough that his survival was amazing. Caviglia had lost one eye and could barely speak or move. How fitting that they would die together. Grandi had already been hanged along with most of the Grand Council of Fascism.
Duke Pietro d'Acquarone, the Minister of the Royal Household, had positioned himself nearby—ready to fling himself upon the King to use his body as a shield, no doubt. His close aids had circled the royal family—all of the King’s adult children and his grandchildren were assembled in one place. He shared a mournful look with his son.
One of the frogmen tried to speak into a metal box he held in one hand, “My Duke, come in? How do we proceed? Please respond.” He looked upwards, the whites of his eyes vibrantly set against the black of his face paint and his balaclava. The noise of the gunfire trailed off. There were handfuls of shots and a lot of rustling.
All of the heads in the room looked upward. Some of the more faithful of the hostages were praying. A few of the dead ministers’ families were in prayer. The princesses tended to the children and did their best to keep them calm as the tears flowed down their faces. The King kept a stoic face, but his facade was cracking and cracking fast.
One of the frogmen started shouting, “Let’s just get it over! Let’s get it done!” He slapped the side of his submachine gun. The children started wailing. Some of the other frogmen started shouting back at him, telling him to wait for orders. The officer seemed shocked that it would be his decision to make. The shouting continued until one of the Marshalls’ adjutants rose and lunged at a gunman.
There was a noise—a tickling of metal on stone. The prostrate mass of limbs—the adjutant and the frogmen—froze as one, and then two, then three, and finally, four black grenades came skittering down the stairs at various speeds.
“Dear God, they’re going to kill us all,” the King muttered. His last thought would be to blame Mussolini—for this, the war—for everything. It was all his fault, and the bastard would not have the decency to kill him properly and let some filthy Americans do it.
Even the frogmen seemed shocked.
Then light—and noise—and the stifling embrace of the Duke and the Queen.
Gunshots followed, voices shouting in Italian in American accents, “Down! Down! Stay Down!” The gun battle was over before the King could claw himself out from his human armor. He looked up at a towering, broad-shouldered American staring down at him; his eyes were hidden behind bulbous glass and a gas mask. His strange rifle was smoking from an even stranger pipe affixed to its barrel. There were eight of the olive-drab figures, caked in ash and dust as the children wailed and the women flinched, expecting the coup de grâce.
The American soldiers made sure the frogmen were dead and finished searching the chamber. Moving fluidly, with a ballerina-like precision—unlike any soldiers he had ever seen, including the Nazi ubermensch who had been their minders. He was confused when he saw a Canadian flag patch on one of their shoulders.
“Clear! It’s Clear!” One of them shouted up the stairs, “JACKPOT! And we need some medics! We’ve got wounded HVTs!”
Medics and more olive-drab ash-caked fighters came down the stairs. One even made a sign of the cross at the altar. At least that one knows his manners. They seemed to be talking to one slimmer but even taller figure in a different helmet and gas mask. The King could not see this American’s eyes, but they were at least six-foot-four on a bad day—a full sixteen inches taller than him. They pressed on their mask and removed it and their helmet in one fluid movement.
A plume of blonde unfurled like a rope out.
“Porco Dio!” the words tumbled from his mouth before he could realize where he was. He made the sign of the cross and whispered a Hail Mary.
“D’Antonio, Radio,” The Amazon—an honest-to-God Amazon was standing before the King—bid off one of the men with a large backpack. “Now, please, can someone find and kill that scar-faced som’bitch?” She turned to one of what was now clearly her men, “Prep them for evac. I want them masked and covered.”
“Regimental freak,” the man answered as he handed her a cord and receiver attached to his boxy backpack.
That puny thing is a radio?
She smiled down at the King with a grin that made him uncomfortable. “All Snake Eater call signs, this Snake Eater Five Delta. Jackpot. PEACH is secure and in friendly possession. I have visual P-ID confirmation of Mario, Luigi, Toad, Yoshi, and Daisy—full list to follow.”
Just a few thoughts and questions
1. Why is there so many cert aircraft? I would think that they would be saved for training
2. How long does ww2 even last in dvtl
3. I really like the detail it’s pretty good.
4. Do the nazis have helicopters?
5. Olympian is downtimer future tech right?
6. What’s the biggest usage of uptimer aircraft post shift
7. Do the Canadians pre-shift get destroyers again?
Now I am curious about the armor. Tank vs tank warfare... what will happen?