The Trojan Horse

Chapter Thirty-Six

Washington DC

USA, Day 69

Jeffery Spender was having a bad day.

It was bad enough that the FBI had been turned into a cheap knock-off of the Gestapo. He’d never signed up to abuse American citizens, back when his wife had become pregnant and he’d been forced to choose between staying with her or staying in the Marines — without her. He’d applied to join the elite FBI Hostage Rescue Team and discovered, much to his surprise, that he actually enjoyed the work. He saw more combat action and saved more American citizens than his brothers in the Marine Corps. And besides, many Marines had been discharged back when the government had started cutting the military in line with the Galactic Federation’s demands. Spencer had known that his position was secure.

And then the government had been forced to order a lockdown and Spencer had found himself serving as their tool. He’d had to raid houses, arrest citizens without any regard for little niceties like law and constitutional rights; the look on the faces of scared citizens would haunt him until the end of his days. If he’d been a bachelor, he would have deserted and joined the resistance, but that hadn’t been a possibility. His wife and his six-year-old daughter had been taken into protective custody, officially because the wives and children of federal agents were being targeted by the resistance. Unofficially, they were hostages for his good behaviour. If he failed to satisfy the government — and its alien masters — that he was doing the job they ordered, he had no doubt that his wife would be killed and his daughter fostered out — or killed herself. He dared not do anything that might alarm their captors.

He scowled. A motley group of federal agents had been placed under his command, with orders to intercept anyone attempting to leave the city. The darkness and the drizzling rain had deterred anyone from driving out, not when they might be shot by the federal agents or arrested and taken to one of the detention centres. Spencer didn’t know quite what happened there, but some of the arrestees became pod people and others simply vanished. Or were vanished, as they’d joked down in Latin America. The fools who had welcomed the Galactic Federation with open arms hadn’t seen how they’d been manipulated until it was far too late. They’d been nothing more than useful fools, just like the American-born Communists and Islamists who had served an agenda that had treated them as nothing better than tools. And really, what had they deserved? They had betrayed their country — and Spencer, by following orders, was no better than them. How could he ever look himself in the face again?

Washington was encircled by a ring of federal agents, backed up by a handful of military units and equipment. No one was allowed to enter or leave without good reason — and there were very few reasons that they were allowed to accept. A number of federal agents had gone completely to the bad, abusing their powers in ways that would have shocked any pre-Contact American — and been completely familiar and accepted in a Third World country. Most of the good ones had deserted, been turned into pod people or — like Spencer — found that their families were being held hostage. At least Spencer’s team wasn’t abusing the refugees. He had that much honour and dignity left.

But there were the stories… federal agents, like everyone else, loved to share stories about what was going on and what was going to happen. Some of the stories were shocking, suggesting mass rape and kidnapping; others were merely worrying. It wouldn’t be long, he’d been assured, before every federal agent was a pod person. And then there would be no hope of resistance. If the Galactic Federation turned everyone on Earth into a pod person… but they couldn’t do that, could they? The logistics would be formidable, even for super-powerful aliens. He checked his M16 automatically as he glanced down the long deserted road. Everything had been much simpler in Iraq. The enemy might have been cowardly enough to hide behind the civilian population, but at least they hadn’t had pod people on their side. And they hadn’t had access to America families.

He heard the truck before he saw it, a lumbering gas tanker heading along the road towards Washington. Gas deliveries had been reduced sharply ever since Tehran, when chaos had spread over the Middle East. Rumour had it that the Saudi Royal Family had been strung up by their own population, while the Iranians were taking their revenge upon the Mullahs who had driven their country into the dirt and Iraqis were slaughtering each other in vast numbers. Not that it really mattered any longer; oil deliveries out of the Middle East were all that mattered, and they’d been reduced. Rumour had it that the aliens were talking about producing synthetic oil, but Spencer no longer believed them. They’d lied to get the human race to let down its guard — and they’d succeeded brilliantly. They’d stolen an entire world.

The tanker started to slow as it approached the roadblock. Traffic in and out of Washington had slowed dramatically since Tehran, leaving the capital perched on the verge of starvation. What little food there was had to be brought in by soldiers and men pressed into service, ever since many of the truckers had gone on strike after Tehran. Seeing a tanker gave him hope, even though he knew that there would only be a small amount of gas — and none of it would be put into civilian hands. They’d be more likely to take it directly to the collaborators.

Shaking his head, Spencer walked forward as the tanker lumbered to a halt. He couldn’t see the driver’s face behind the windscreen, but that was hardly surprising. The rain was pelting down now, as if even the weather disapproved of the aliens. Or maybe the aliens were manipulating the weather from orbit. God knew they’d shown enough remarkable tricks before they’d shown their true faces. Maybe they’d promised their collaborators sunshine and rainbows while drenching the rest of the world with cold rainfall.

The driver’s door didn’t open. Puzzled, and a little alarmed, Spencer stepped up and pulled at the handle. The door opened, revealing a makeshift doll — life-sized, wearing male clothes — grinning at him. There was no one else in the cab. He stared at it, his tired brain refusing to quite process what he was seeing, and then he threw himself backwards. It was far too late.

Mathew Bracken, who was officially dead, loved C4. It was a common feeling among the SF community, who firmly believed that there was no such thing as enough C4. Rigging up the gas tanker with enough explosive to destroy the roadblock utterly had been easy; it had been more complicated to rig the tanker so it could be driven by remote control. In the end, they’d had to cannibalise a set of remote-control cars to construct the control system — and even then it had been flighty. But it had sure paid off on the night. The explosion smashed the roadblock as if it had been made of paper, throwing a pair of police cars dozens of meters away from the blast. They caught fire and burned merrily, adding an eerie light to the scene.

He exchanged a grin with two of his men and settled down to wait. It wasn’t long before they saw the vehicles driving towards the burning roadblock. The collaborators had been smart enough to keep a quick-reaction force on permanent standby, knowing that they would have to seal any hole in their ring of steel before insurgents started getting in or out of Washington. Mathew waited until they’d stopped near the burning cars, and then carefully targeted their positions. The pod people had made one elementary mistake. Their leader was obvious to the sniper waiting with Mathew’s team.

“Fire,” Mathew ordered, quietly.

The SEAL team opened fire as one. Carl, his sniper, took out the enemy leader, while the others contented themselves with random bursts that forced the enemy team to dive for cover. An RPG, fired at one of the enemy vehicles, caused it to explode into a fireball, illuminating the eerie scene. The enemy team hadn’t trained together very well; instead of firing back, or retreating in good order, they either hid and cowered or ran for their lives. Mathew had once had reservations about shooting men in the back. Now, with his country under enemy occupation and governed by puppets and traitors, he had no objection to killing them all by whatever method seemed quickest. Besides, the runners would probably scream for help when they reached somewhere out of the line of fire. Better that the enemy believed that their response force had run into a phantom army than to have any idea just how few resistance fighters there were on the front lines.

A brilliant flash of light lit up the horizon, followed rapidly by a pearl of thunder. For one moment, Mathew thought that someone had popped off a nuke or that the aliens had decided to intervene directly, before realising that it was neither. One of the other squads of insurgents had been planning a nasty surprise for the enemy; if the resistance was lucky, they’d spend long enough wondering just what the fuck had happened to allow the resistance to withdraw safely. But once they figured out that there was no radiation — or forced their men forward anyway — the cat would be out of the bag.

“Cover me,” he muttered. Tom and Markus provided cover, shooting at any enemy heads that showed themselves, while Mathew slipped down towards the ambush scene. The human eye was naturally lazy, attracted to light. He should be invisible in the shadows, at least until he started shooting. An enemy body appeared in front of him and he almost squeezed off a round before he realised that the enemy’s head had been blown off. He must have caught a series of rounds from the light machine gun the SEAL team had placed close to the ambush site.

A trio of enemy fighters were hiding behind the remains of a car, trying to fire uncoordinated bursts back towards their ambushers. It wouldn’t have been a bad tactic if they’d known what they were doing, but as it was they were doing little more than forcing the SEAL team to duck from time to time. Spray and pray hadn’t worked in the Middle East and it wouldn’t work in America. They had no idea Mathew was behind them until he shot them all neatly in the back of the head. A badly-wounded enemy fighter, lying on the ground, waved desperately to Mathew; one look and Mathew knew that no medical centre would be able to save his life. He hesitated, remembering that he was looking down at a collaborator, and then remembered simple humanity. A single shot ran out and the wounded soldier went onwards into the next world.

Four more SEALs materialised out of the darkness and advanced forward, their weapons and combat goggles sweeping for enemy fighters. One fighter, a young man barely out of his teens, was found trembling behind one of the smashed containers they’d used to build their roadblock. The SEALs dragged him out, tied his hands, and placed him up against one of the wrecked cars. He wasn’t a hardcore enemy fighter, Mathew noted, nor did it appear that he had any real training at all. He’d already shat himself and the stench was noticeable, even against the stench of burning gasoline.

Mathew pointed his gun right into the young man’s face and he started to whimper. Mathew felt nothing, but disgust. It was possible to feel sorry for the men and women who had been forced into serving the Snakes — either through having their family as hostages or by being brainwashed into becoming pod people — yet it was impossible to feel anything for a young man who had abandoned his country to serve the aliens of his own free will. He clearly wasn’t a pod person, or he would have gone for Mathew’s throat by now. Pod people had no sense of self-preservation. They could have given the Iraqi insurgents lessons in suicide tactics. The aliens had wiped them of everything, but a desire to serve, whatever the cost.

“Here’s how it’s going to work,” Mathew said, pressing the gun against the young man’s mouth. “You answer my questions and I’ll leave you here to be found by your friends. If you lie to me, or I think you lie to me, I’ll cut you up badly and leave you here to bleed out and die. Do you understand me?”

The young man nodded frantically. Mathew wasn’t too surprised. The real hard cases, the men who wouldn’t talk even if they were put through the water treatment or beaten to within an inch of their lives, were normally recognisable to a trained interrogator, who would put them aside for careful interrogation. It would hardly be the first time Mathew had extracted information from an enemy fighter who had gotten in way over his head, but it had always left him feeling dirty. Torture, however disguised, was not honourable. It was unworthy of anyone who wanted to call himself a trained soldier.

“Good,” Mathew said. “Now… let’s see, shall we?”

He bounced questions off the young man’s head for seven minutes, while the remainder of the SEALs searched the dead bodies and removed any number of ID and useful tools. They’d have to be dropped off at one of the safe houses for careful inspection before they were taken anywhere near one of their hiding places; Mathew wouldn’t have put it past the aliens to slip a tracking implant on the ID or one of their tools, just so they could track it back to the resistance headquarters. The young man knew very little, unsurprisingly. He’d been seduced into joining the aliens because his family was starving and his father had been thrown in one of the detention camps. A not unfamiliar story to Mathew, but one that had been largely unknown in the United States, at least before the aliens had arrived. They were building a real police state, with death camps and a constant heavy surveillance of everyone who lived within their boundaries. How long would it be before they broke the human race down to nothing more than slaves?

Shaking his head, he gagged the young man and then left his hand cuffed to one of the cars. His friends would find him, although Mathew had no idea what they would do with him. They’d probably demand to know why he was still alive when all the rest were dead, but it had really been nothing more than the luck of the draw. Or maybe they would kill him to encourage the others. The human race hadn’t needed any lessons in savagery from the Snakes. Hell, there were people on the internet who believed that most of the bad reports came from humans exceeding orders from their masters, rather than atrocities carried out by the Snakes, or at their direct command. Mathew knew that that was a lie. Snake infantry forces had been carrying out reprisals almost from the exact moment they’d landed on Earth.

“Dude,” Carl whispered, as the SEALs started to make their way back out of Washington. They’d head due west, and then cut down in hopes of avoiding pursuit. “We’ve got choppers inbound.”

Not ours, of course, Mathew thought, with a grim smile. There had been a time when all aircraft were automatically friendly, even if they weren’t American. Now the only ones who were flying were the aliens and their collaborators. The airlines had gone bust and most of their pilots had been sucked into flying for the aliens, or had managed to desert before they’d been rounded up.

“Get the Stingers ready,” he ordered. “But remember our orders. Only shoot if you’re sure that there are no Snakes in the craft.”

It wasn’t an order that made any sense, but he wasn’t going to disobey it unless there was a really good reason. Breaking the chain of command — such as it was, as his team were technically either deserters or dead — would have meant that they were nothing more than bandits, doomed to a slow collapse into barbarity. How long would it be before the locals made peace with the aliens and worked with them to hunt down the resistance if the resistance preyed on them? And they would, eventually. The stockpiled supplies wouldn’t last forever.

The three helicopters swept into view, brilliant spotlights shining down at the ground. Mathew allowed himself a tight smile, even as he prepped the Stinger and took aim at the lead helicopter. The collaborators clearly hadn’t spent any time in actual combat, outside the riots and protests that turned the cities into war zones for a few days or hours. It didn’t seem to have occurred to them that showing themselves to the enemy so blatantly was a bad idea. They could have hunted the SEALs using infrared sensors while drifting high overhead, or sent in one of the latest model of Predator drones to track them down and drop a Hellfire on their heads. Chances were that the CIA had taken them all out before the aliens landed, but who knew for sure? What remained of the US military was in absolute chaos.

He clicked the seeker on and the Stinger locked onto its target. A second later, he pulled the trigger, dumped the stock on the ground and started to run. If the enemy reacted fast enough… but they didn’t. Their reactions were too slow. The Stinger punched its way into the cockpit and detonated inside the helicopter. Moments later, the other two missiles hit and the helicopters exploded. Mathew whistled and the SEALs started to run. They’d meet up with higher authority, reload and then get back to the war.

As one, the SEALs ghosted into the night.