Chapter 12: Bring it on

Mac split the squads into four man sabre teams as he had learned during his time with the SAS. Each member of a sabre team had skills that complimented the others in the team to provide the whole with a broad range of experience. Helfe had already proven herself the equal of any of the troopers and she led a team in her own right.

That gave Mac some three hundred and fifty teams to use and he knew he could cause a hell of a lot of mayhem with the skills they had. He split the team up, fifty to make their way behind the iLOX lines to explore, gather intelligence and generally blow up anything of strategic worth to the aliens. A further one hundred teams were allocated to the border itself with instructions to make any crossing by the iLOX as costly as it could possibly be. The last two hundred teams would be spread throughout the ranks of the ten thousand men from Scotland and the twenty thousand fighting droids. Mac hoped that would help bolster the defence that those forces were able to put up.

Each team was fully equipped with communications equipment; ammo and some had the surprises that Scott had transported out to them. Scott had liased with the engineers and some of the 'blocked' passageways into China were opened up. This allowed the fifty sabre teams that were going behind the iLOX lines to make most of the journey in relative safety. It was to be expected that the iLOX would have infiltrated the passageways, but the Special Forces had already demonstrated how effective they were down there.

Helfe's team was one of the first to set out for China. Her three colleagues were all male, two Europeans and one South American. The South American was of indigenous Indian heritage and he was a giant of a man. His name was Urql and he stood six foot four tall and had the muscle to fill out his large frame. His skin was a deep red colour and he had short cropped black hair. His expertise was not surprisingly in hand to hand combat, but he also doubled as an engineer and demolitions expert.

One of the Europeans was English. Peter Lovegood was his name and he was nothing much to look at. Standing at around five foot nine tall, he was thin and wiry with nondescript brown hair and blue eyes. His skills were with weapons and he had proven himself to be one of the best marksmen the Special Forces had ever seen. He also doubled as the team's medical expert and had an extensive, if small, first aid pack.

The other European was German and called Kurt Mueller. Again he was of medium height and build, but what weight he carried was solid muscle. Kurt was the team's vehicles expert and there wasn't much by way of land or air craft that he didn't know how to drive or fly. Kurt was also the team's communications expert and he carried the main comms gear.

Finally there was Helfe herself. She had demonstrated high levels of skill across the range of specialities. She was adept at marshal arts, so a formidable hand to hand combat trooper. She could also turn her hand to explosives, communications and some driving and flying. Her marksmanship was also very good and last, but not least, she was an expert in infiltration. Helfe had the ability to enter just about any building using a little toolkit of electronic and hand-held tools.

The team descended into one of the passageways on the Chinese/Russian border. A check had been made about using transport hub technology to travel and they had been told it was risky, but possible. Sensors could detect the presence of any iLOX and passengers being transported could be brought to a halt before they were too close to the aliens. Helfe had decided to go for it as the quickest way of getting them to where they had to be. The team's allocated area was on the south side of Peking (Beijing) and they knew that other teams would be heading for other points around that great population centre, but clear lines had been drawn to mark out the territory that each was to work in. Helfe's team had the call sign 'Valkyrie' and she loved it! A call sign fitting a Viking she thought.

They made their way to one of the transport hubs used by the engineers who serviced the passageway and very quickly transported to just outside Peking. Helfe was now faced with her next tough decision - stay underground or go topside?

The team worked best when all of them were involved in the discussions about their actions and Helfe now whispered to the other three and took their views about the best way ahead. Travelling underground would probably be less dangerous for them, but they wouldn't be able to gather much intelligence if the iLOX were all on the surface. On the other hand, they could use the passageways to get under the force field and in amongst the aliens before then making their way to the surface to spy out the lay of the land.

Eventually the team unanimously agreed to take the underground approach and they split up, two to each side of the passageway, as they made their way through the darkness. Each of them had slipped on a pair of night glasses and the ghostly green luminosity allowed them to move forward with reasonable speed. Surprisingly, the quietest of the four was Urql, the big Indian moving fluidly on the balls of his feet.

After walking for what Helfe estimated was two miles, the sabre team came to a massive roof fall. It was clear that this was substantial and not accidental, probably their wolfish friends the iLOX cutting off weak points in their defences. The team agreed that they would need to fall back on the second option and make their way to the surface.

Backtracking, they found one of the little side shafts that held a ladder leading up to the surface. Helfe glanced at her watch to check the time, satisfying herself that it would be dark outside, then she took the point and led the way up. When she reached the top of the shaft she found it had a vent over it and she was able to see through the slats to the Chinese countryside beyond.

She sat absolutely still for some minutes, relying on her peripheral vision to pick up any movement. The Special Forces were trained in these techniques and Helfe knew her peripheral vision was one of the most heightened and sensitive of her senses. Humans had evolved to make it so, movement being a sign of other life forms and therefore a potential source of danger or food. She used it now to try to identify whether there were any iLOX close by.

At last she was satisfied that there was nothing to worry about. She withdrew a little electronic device from the pouch at her waist and silently began to remove the fastenings that held the vent in place. She took her time here too, moving painstakingly slowly so as to make no sound that might give them away. As each fastening came loose, she caught it in her hand and slipped it into her pocket. When the last one was dealt with, she once more sat for a few minutes, trying to sense anything out of place or threatening. Satisfied that she was still undetected, she lifted the vent and, raising herself a few feet, set it to the side of the shaft's mouth.

Helfe hoisted herself out of the shaft and quickly rolled to the side into some deeper vegetation, her weapon at the ready. A few minutes later and Peter did the same, rolling to the other side of the shaft and taking up a defensive position immediately. Next out was Kurt and he rolled forward before freezing and beginning to slowly 'quarter' the ground ahead, looking for enemies. Last out was Urql who 'crabbed' his way to a point that allowed the sabre team to now have three hundred and sixty degree coverage of their immediate area.

The team was now using their throat mikes to whisper to each other and after five minutes of lying prone they all agreed it was safe to move. Helfe carefully replaced the vent on the mouth of the shaft, securing it with only one of the fasteners - who knows, they might want to get back down there in a hurry.

It wasn't difficult for the team to identify the direction in which they would need to move. As well as their compass bearings, they could now detect the huge dome of a shield through their night glasses and that marked where the iLOX were based. Urql took the point and led them off towards it.

The four-man team moved slowly and silently through the vegetation, responding to Urql's hand signals. After an hour of careful progress they were only a few hundred yards from the shield. The four of them closed with each other now and found a good spot to observe what was going on on the other side of the shield.

Very quickly they picked out patrols of iLOX troopers moving round the perimeter of the shield. Helfe wasn't impressed by their state of readiness and thought that the presence of the shield was probably giving them a false sense of security. She automatically began timing the gap between patrols and found that it was exactly eighteen minutes. She waited for the latest patrol to move off and then tapped her three team members on the head and indicated she was going forward.

Helfe crabbed her way quickly to the shield and extracted some small objects from one of her chest pouches. She reached up and carefully placed four mini-parasites onto the shield to form a one-foot square. She glanced down at her watch and gave the parasites five minutes to do their work, then reached into her other chest pouch and extracted a plastic zip-lock bag. Unzipping the bag, she tipped a cloud of smart-dust through the hole in the shield that the parasites had created. Once the dust was inside, she turned the parasites off, uncoiled some wire and quickly earthed them. When they had drained, she stashed them back into her pouch and crabbed back into cover with the rest of the team.

The smart-dust would give them 'eyes' and 'ears' inside the iLOX camp and they could remain in relative safety while they scoped things out and planned their next move. Kurt already had a small computer open and they were looking at the screen as the smart-dust spread out and began its observations. Helfe indicated that they should take it in turn to get some sleep and they agreed two would sleep at a time while two kept watch and tracked what the smart-dust was feeding them.

Mac had stayed with the sabre teams that were trying to cover the border, as he felt this was where the greatest threat would come first. He had one hundred teams spread over a twenty mile stretch of the border, woefully thin he knew, but all of them crack troopers. The cloaked drones he had overhead were feeding live video of the iLOX advance so he could see exactly what they were facing despite the cover of darkness.

The first challenge before them was the iLOX fighters. Mac could see on his computer that there were hundreds of them in flights of five at a time and they were approaching fast. This would be an opportunity to test out one of Scott's new toys. As the fighters raced towards them they were firing their lasers indiscriminately, burning up the vegetation as they came. There was almost a wall of flame heading towards him, turning the night into day. As the lances of super heated laser light got closer to where Mac's troops were, there were a lot of nervous looks and some fidgeting.

"Hold your nerve laddies," Mac whispered through his throat mike.

The pilots on the fighters were walking their lasers ahead of them, seeking out any enemies on the ground and cleansing them to leave a clear line of march for the ground troops that followed on behind. The first wave of fighters was made up of ten flights of five along this stretch of the border. Suddenly the pilots saw their laser beams jerk upwards, arcing towards the sky. They couldn't control them and nothing they did re-directed the lasers towards the ground.