Apache Dawn, - [little bear else holmelund minarik txt] 📗

contact with Slipknot. You are weapons-free to engage any enemy encountered. Just get to that hospital!”

“Copy that, Nest. Striker, Actual, out.” Cooper switched back to his command frequency.

“Let’s get down to the street. Go, go, go!” he said, pumping his arm for the men on the adjacent building to see.

“I’ve got a fire escape, east side,” said Mike, already running across the roof.

Once on the ground, Cooper’s squad took a knee, weapons up and covering all sectors as he consulted the map attached his arm guard. “All right, we’re two blocks south of the objective. Charlie—”

“Yeah?”

“Get set up. We’ll leapfrog to the annex building across the alley from the objective, south side.”

“Hooyah,” was Charlie’s whispered reply from the opposite side of the building.

“Let’s go,” Cooper said. He flashed a hand gesture and led his fireteam across the dark alley. He noticed the absence of normal civilian traffic. There were a few cars driving by, but nothing like what he had expected for Los Angeles at sunset. It should be packed with civvies. It looked liked the general population was heeding the government’s call to stay home and avoid contact with people to try and stem the spread of the flu. Or maybe the reports that people were starting to die weren’t just media hype. Either way, Cooper didn’t like what he saw.

“Awful quiet,” Charlie whispered from a block away.

“Where the hell is everybody?” asked Tank.

“Coop, I got a body in the street. Civvie,” whispered Tank. A second later, “No wounds. He’s cold. Think it was the flu?”

“Damn if I know. Just keep your eyes open and try not to touch anything. No one gets infected. Team 1 moving.” Cooper paused at the corner of a building, covering the forward advance of the rest of his fireteam. In the distance, he could hear an ambulance siren echo. He checked his frequency. “Striker to Slipknot Support, do you read me?”

Static.

Switching back to his command frequency, he whispered, “Still can’t raise the Secret Service. Something ain’t right, boys. Stay frosty,” he warned.

“Team 2 in position,” Charlie reported in a whisper.

Cooper waited until he could see Mike, Jax, and Swede at the emergency exit of the parking garage across the street—three shadows waiting for him. Suddenly, the world around him was plunged into darkness.

“Wait one,” he hissed. The ground started to rumble, then a dull, deep booooom echoed between the buildings around them. Car alarms went off and in the distance, he heard glass shattering from what must’ve been dozens of plate-glass windows.

“The hell was that?” hissed Charlie.

“Earthquake?” asked Jax.

“Go dark!” whispered Cooper. Now that the street lights and shop signs were extinguished, he flipped down the state-of-the-art wide-view night-vision goggles attached to his helmet and turned them on. The world went black, then glowed green and came into clear focus.

The six-tube design gave him the widest possible view with the best clarity and definition available. He could see the blinking IR markers on his team across the street as they crouched, weapons out, scanning for threats. Textbook. He grinned.

“Nest, Striker, Actual, how copy?” he whispered. Getting no response, he gritted his teeth and sprinted across the street. As he took his place next to Mike, he tried again. “I say again, Nest, come in. This is Striker, Actual.”

Static.

“I got a bad feeling about this,” whispered Charlie’s voice. “All clear from our side. Comm net totally deserted.”

“Well, if that was a ‘quake, our job just got a little harder. Hey, I got a visual on the main entrance. We’re a hundred yards out. Moving now,” warned Cooper. He used hand signals to direct his squad. One by one, they filed out and ran for the annex building, staying as close to walls as they could.

“No movement from the rooftops. I don’t think our tangos hung around,” reported Charlie.

Cooper paused at the corner of the Annex building to catch his breath and scan the rooftops once more. “Team 1 in position. Rooftops clear. Bring it home, 2.”

“Moving.”

Out of the green-tinted shadows displayed in his night-vision goggles, Cooper watched his second-in-command lead the last remaining fireteam. Each man sprinted forward and dropped to one knee, covering everything in front and above him. The next man ran past and found a spot farther along and like clockwork, they leapfrogged past each other.

Cooper couldn’t shake a feeling that they were being watched. Something was wrong, very wrong. First they had been ambushed by men on rooftops directly along their flight path with shoulder-fired missiles that took out half his SEAL team. There were attackers scattered everywhere along their possible evasion routes, then nothing. Communications with Coronado just went down the toilet. Now, just as they were approaching their objective, power goes out in this part of Los Angeles. He could see in the distance the high-rise buildings that were still lit up like Christmas trees. So, the rumbling they’d felt wasn’t an earthquake.

Someone had selectively taken out power to the area just around hospital and nowhere else. That was not the result of a minor earthquake. That showed planning, resources, and purpose. It was a trap—a well-executed one, but a trap, nonetheless. He could feel it in his bones.

Static tickled Cooper’s ear. He checked his frequency. “—in, Striker!”

Relief washed over him. “Go ahead, Nest, Striker, Actual. What the hell is going on?” he whispered.

“—attack, say again, comms failing—”

Cooper frowned. “Say again, Nest?”

“—blind, GPS, and our satellites are being—”

“Nest!” said Cooper. “Come in!”

“—Korean strike force! Hostiles in your—”

“Nest!” hissed Cooper. No response. He looked around. Los Angeles was looking more like Tehran by the minute.

“Coop, what the fuck was that about?” asked Charlie.

Cooper checked the main and auxiliary command frequencies. Nothing. Switching back to his squad, he sighed. “All right guys, I think we’re on our own. Last I could tell, it sounded like HQ said our satellites have been taken out by the North Koreans. I’ll bet you a case of beer those tangos on the rooftops were NKors, too.”

Automatic weapons fire echoed in the distance. It was joined with more, closer it seemed, to the west. Now they could hear multiple sirens and people screaming at the edge of their hearing. Horns started to honk at intersections where the stoplights were out. The panicked voices of civilians filtered in between the darkened buildings.

“I got tangos firing on the hospital’s north entrance!” called out Mike from the south corner of the annex building.

“—units this net, repeat, all units this net: Apache Dawn is in effect. This is not a drill! I repeat, all units this net, Apache—” The link went dead in a painful burst of high-pitched static.

The sound of a gun battle rattled all around them. A louder bang signaled someone’s use of a grenade. Single pop-pops. It sounded like pistols firing in between all of the rat-a-tat-a-tat’s of AK fire. The screams of wounded, frightened civilians penetrated the night. Cooper could also detect the sharp popping of M4s. It sounded to him like the Secret Service had enough sense at least to bring a few real guns.

Civilians appeared in ones and twos, dragging and pulling each other away from the fighting. Some were yelling for help and calling on God. Most just ran, crashing into each other and anything that got in their way. Fear, Cooper observed, was a powerful motivator.

“What the hell is Apache Dawn?” asked Tank. The sound of his voice drew Cooper’s attention back to the mission. He ignored the civvies and activated his mic.

“That means we’re in some deep, deep yogurt.” Cooper paused as a man shoved an elderly woman out of his way. The old woman angrily shook off Cooper’s hand when he tried to steady her.

“Let go of me!” she hissed. She tottered off, clutching her tattered dress tightly.

Cooper shook his head. “Listen up, Striker. Our president is across the street, under siege in that hospital. All that stands between him and those NKors over there are a handful of Secret Service agents. It is up to us to reach and secure him. That, gentlemen, we will do, at all costs.”

An explosion echoed across the street and the number of screaming civilians diminished. Smoke drifted across into their positions. Cooper could see a man trying to half-drag, half-support a woman with blood covering most of her lower body.

Doctors, nurses, patients—some in hospital gowns flowing in the wind—along with people caught on the street, all streamed out of the hospital. The surrounding buildings were emptying as well, contributing to the growing river of screaming, shoving, panicked humanity spreading in all directions away from the invaders.

Most people seemed not to notice the squad of dark-clad heavily armed SEALs wearing night-vision goggles as Cooper tried to lead his team through the roiling wave of civvies. “Keep moving forward!” he yelled, pushing a screaming man out of his way.

“Help us!” someone shouted.

“Run! Move!”

“My baby—”

The voices rose into a cacophony of sound that fought for dominance with the explosions that shook the ground. In all his years of training and fighting around the world, Cooper had never experienced anything so chaotic.

A break in the mass of fleeing civvies let him throw his back against the corner of a building adjacent to the hospital. It was forward progress, but not