The Shift: Book II of the Wildfire Saga (7 page)

“All units, this is Actual.
 
Move to your assigned positions and wait for my signal."

Moving as quietly as he could, Alston crawled through dead leaves and fallen pine boughs as he made his way to the very crest of the ridge.
 
On the other side of the long hill, just beyond a shallow depression filled with waist-high grass and weeds, the civil airport that served the Lumford, South Carolina area lay shrouded in darkness.
 

He immediately spotted the running lights on a Russian Mi-24 Hind as it idled in the middle of the tarmac.
 
At this distance, the sound waves from the rotors barely penetrated the forest.
 
He cautiously worked his way downslope.
 
Two spot lights lit up from the closest hangar and pointed at the helicopter.
 
He paused behind a pine tree and peered around the trunk.

Four figures emerged from the Hind.
 
A fifth stumbled out into the light as if shoved.
 
This last figure was almost as tall as the others and appeared to be shackled and hooded.
 
Alston’s heart leapt at the thought that he had just discovered the Source being transferred—then he realized
 
that captive couldn’t be the source: the shoulders were too narrow and they walked more like a woman.

Why did they take a female captive?
 
He stared at the figure through his binoculars.
 
What did you do to get in this situation, lady?
 
Alston lowered the binos and stowed them in his hip pouch.
 
He pushed the woman from his mind.
 
She wasn’t his problem—he had to find the Source.

Alston watched the guards as they dragged, shoved, and cajoled their prisoner across the tarmac towards the control tower building.
 
They walked casually behind the hooded woman, rifles at the ready.
 
They looked lazy.
 

He gave the signal for his men to halt their progress and waited.
 
A few tense moments later, the helicopter’s door slid shut and it clawed its way into the sky.
 
He waited a good 30 seconds after the helicopter had disappeared and its sound faded into the soft breeze before he gave the signal for his men to renew their forward progress.

Sifting his way through knee-high grass and a few briar patches, he made his way down the south side of the ridge toward the northern edge of the airport proper.
 
Too slow, Alston.
 
This is taking too long…

Creeping forward, Alston approached the edge of the airfield just behind a large chain link fence.
 
On his side of the fence, the grass and weeds were knee-high or higher.
 
On the other side, the grass had recently been trimmed.
 
He examined his options while he paused to catch his breath.

It’s already in my lungs…that little crawl shouldn’t have winded me like this.
 
Gotta go faster or I’ll never make it back to Denver…

His position was the center of their attack.
 
They would cut a hole through the fence, infiltrate the airfield and make their way across to the large hanger on the far side of the auxiliary runway.
 

Alston pointed his night vision gear at the back wall of the closest hangar.
 
‘Distance to target’ displayed in the bottom right corner of his field of view: 53 yards.
 

Assuming there were no guards, it would be an easy stroll in the darkness.
 
However, he was not in the habit of assuming anything in combat was ever easy.
 
He operated under the rule that the enemy was always better equipped and trained then his own men—it kept things in focus.

But was Huntley here?
 
That was the question that he had pondered on their long trip from Idaho.
 
They had bird-dogged the Russians across the United States from civil airport to municipal landing pads.
 
He and
 
the men under his command had traced the path of destruction the Russians left behind.
 
Everywhere the Russians had stopped to refuel, they had slaughtered anyone unfortunate enough to be found nearby and had taken what supplies they could before setting fire to everything else.

It had been a long, slow process to track them this far—every time Alston tried to land, he’d found most of the local fuel reserves had already been destroyed or stolen by their Russian prey.
 
As a result, they often had to range far and wide looking for alternate sources of fuel.
 
It had taken them almost a week to traverse in Ospreys what normally would have been a four or five hour flight in a jet.

Of the five Bell-Boeing V-22 Ospreys in which they had flown out of Salmon Falls, three remained.
 
One had been lost to mechanical malfunctions on the west side of the Appalachian Mountains near Cumberland, Tennessee.
 

Looking at the size of the airport before them, Alston regretted the fact that the second Osprey had been shot down by friendly forces as they cruised over one of the towns recently occupied by the Russian soldiers.
 

He closed his eyes and tried to block the memory of tracers illuminating the night.
 
One of the Osprey pilots had screamed that his aircraft had taken damage a split-second before the starboard wing had exploded into a ball of fire. A lucky shot had struck the fuel tank and ignited a fire that sent the Osprey and all 19 Marines on board to a fiery death.
 
When Alston’s surviving vehicles had landed, the Rangers and Marines mounted a counterattack to make sure that any survivors were recovered.
 
What they found had been a shock.

The local American population had risen up against the Russian invaders—much as they had done in Salmon Falls—and had liberated their town.
 
When they saw the Ospreys, the civilians had panicked and believed them to be Russian reinforcements.
 

Alston opened his eyes and re-examined the small airport before him.
 
At least the sacrifices the Marines on that Osprey had made had not been in vain.
 
The survivors had been resupplied and everyone had gotten a good night’s sleep and plenty of food on the last leg of their pursuit.
 

He glanced to his left and saw a green ghost inch his way through the underbrush.
 
Alston saw just the barest hint of an outline of a second Marine beyond the first.
 
They both vanished again in the darkness as quickly and silently as they had appeared.

He brought his attention back to the airfield and the task at hand.
 
Before him, the auxiliary runway stretched east to west across the airport property in an unbroken gray line.
 
Beyond that was their target building:
 
the largest hangar at the small airfield.
 

Alston had his doubts about whether or not this was even the correct airport.
 
He pulled the Russian map from his thigh pocket and looked at it again in the darkness.
 
Was it a decoy?
 
Perhaps the Russians had circled this one on the map and gone on to another airport.
 
Was this a trap?
 
The fact that the Russians seemed to be trying to escape the notice of the local population made him wary.
 
It was opposite what they’d done in every other town they’d stopped on the way from Idaho.

Surely they wouldn't have left the map behind on purpose?
 
In their haste to trade for Mr. Huntley with that traitor Apache pilot and escape the chaos that enveloped Salmon Falls, the Russians had left behind many of their supplies, including the map.
 
But was it a plant?

Alston grimaced and folded the map.
 
He looked back to the airport.
 
He could easily see two other hangars across the main runway that ran north-south.
 
The control tower rose up like a blocky finger, attached to a long rectangular terminal building.

His eyes were again drawn to the grass on the other side of the fence.
 
It had been cut.
 
Why was that bothering him?
 

Someone’s trying to make this place look as normal as possible.
 

The grass, the prisoner transfer, and the Hind all confirmed the Russians were on-site.
 
But was the Source?
 

Alston shifted position and pushed a strand of thick weeds out of his vision.
 
He was willing to bet before the Russians arrived the grass on the other side of that fence had been just as tall.
 
Judging by the surrounding towns, the airfield had likely been abandoned ten years ago.
 
Until recently,
 
no one had bothered to mind the landscaping.

No, the Russians were there.
 
They cut the grass to be able to see anyone approach.
 
They had cleared the airfield grounds for a hundred yards in every direction.
 
It must have taken them days.
 

That’s no way to set a trap.
 
Alston grinned in the darkness.
 
At least not for me.

"All units Hammer 2, Actual,” he whispered.
 
“Radio check when in position."
 

Alston waited for the responses and continued to scan the airport.
 
There were two lights on in the control tower.
 
One at the top, in the air traffic control room and one at the base of the tower.
 
He picked out at least seven lights at random intervals along the length of the terminal building.
 
They were all on the first floor.
 
The windows of the second floor remained completely dark.
 
He reached up and switched his night vision to thermal imaging.
 

Three shapes immediately popped out as white spots on the roof of the terminal.
 
Two of them began to move.
 
A slow steady pace along the edge of the roof line.
 
The third sat motionless.
 
Right in the middle.

"Hammer 2, be advised: three guards on the roof of the terminal,” he whispered.

"
Actual, Hammer 2-2,"
replied Gunnery Sergeant Thomas Morin, the NCO in charge of the Marine detachment.
 
"
I got guards on the east side of the control tower.
 
Three of them, down by the door
."

"
Actual, Golf
," said Garza’s voice.
 
He'd been assigned to the far southeastern corner of the airport and been working his way toward his Overwatch position for the last two hours.
 
"
I'm in position, I got more guards on the far side of the target hangar.
 
My count is five, but they're moving around…it's hard to tell at this distance…"

"Actual copies all, wait one."
 
As the remaining elements of his strike team checked in, he considered his options.
 
Right now, the entire airport was surrounded by nearly 100 Rangers and Marines.
 
From what he could gather, there were at least 15 guards visible outside the buildings.
 

Alston focused on the main runway.
 
He could see the dark outlines of three Russian transport planes—they looked just similar enough to the venerable C-130 Hercules to fool a civilian, but the angle of the tail fin was too steep and the sweep of the wings was all wrong.
 

To a man who had spent most of his career jumping out the back of airplanes, it was easy to spot the differences.
 
Those planes were not American.
 
The rear ramps on two of the Antonov An-12s rested open on the ground.
 
The interiors were dark caves.
 
There was no movement and no thermal signatures.
 
The planes had been shut down for some time.
 
The engines were cold.

Each one of those planes, he knew, could hold upwards of 60 paratroopers.
 
If he sent his strike force in and attacked along all points of the perimeter, he could very well walk into a hornets’ nest.
 
He could be vastly outnumbered.
 

He frowned.
 
Alston preferred to make battlefield decisions based on facts, not guesses.
 
The Rangers and Marines under his command were far too valuable to risk unnecessarily.
 
He decided to rearrange the attack pattern.
 
There would be no mass assault.
 
He couldn't take the chance that the airfield might be too heavily defended.
 

 
He decided the most likely position for Mr. Huntley would be either one of the four hangars—including the largest, their primary target—or more likely, inside the terminal itself.
 
First order of business was recon and confirmation.
 

Someone needed to check it out and see what was there.
 
In fact, someone needed to get to each hangar.
 
For that, they would need a distraction.
 
If he could focus the Russians on the other side of the airfield, it would be possible for a single man to slip through the fence and check out each hangar at the same time.

He needed a diversion.

But what kind?
 
He tried to stop another cough and ended up making a sound closer to gagging.
 
He wiped sweat from his brow and felt an involuntary shudder.
 
Shit.
 
Getting a fever now…