Chapter 80: Chapter 80: General Raddock (1) (Bonus Chapter)
The night air over the secluded Appalachian valley was dead quiet. This was a heavily fortified outpost nested deep in a geographical bowl, fifty miles from the nearest civilian highway.
Officially, it was an ordnance testing ground. Unofficially, it was the private fortress of General Raddock and the 4th Special Forces Group.
High voltage floodlights carved geometric shapes out of the darkness, illuminating the razor wire fences, the concrete guard towers and the sprawling motor pool filled with Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Abrams tanks.
In the southern watchtower, Specialist Miller, the real Specialist Miller, entirely unaware that his face had been worn by a clone to burn down a Vought facility... leaned against the reinforced glass.
He brought a steaming thermos of cheap coffee to his lips, his eyes scanning the pitch black tree line.
"Fucking freezing tonight," Miller muttered, his breath fogging the glass.
His partner, Corporal Jenkins, didn’t look up from the thermal radar monitor. "Wind’s picking up. Thermal is clean. Just deer and coyotes out there."
Miller took another sip of his coffee. The liquid never reached his throat.
A high velocity sniper round, fired from a Spencer Industries prototype rifle a mile away, punched through the reinforced glass of the watchtower as if it were wet tissue paper.
The round took Miller precisely in the center of his forehead. His skull erupted in a spray of bone fragments and gray matter, painting the back wall of the tower in a macabre Jackson Pollock of gore.
His headless body stood upright for a fraction of a second before collapsing like a marionette with its strings cut.
Jenkins had exactly half a second to process the spray of warm blood across his face before the second round took him through the throat, severing his spinal cord and pinning his body to the radar console.
Down in the valley, the ten man Vought elite tactical team emerged from the tree line. They wore the cutting edge gear Stan Edgar had procured from Aryan Spencer.
They were clad in radar absorbent, carbon nanotube weave armor. Their faces were hidden behind multi spectral visors that fed them real time thermal, night vision and electromagnetic data.
They looked less like soldiers and more like androids from a dystopian future.
The team leader, designated Alpha One, raised a closed fist. The ten men fanned out, moving with a synchronized silent grace that spoke of decades of black ops experience.
They approached the primary checkpoint. Four heavily armed military sentries stood behind concrete barricades, their M4 rifles slung casually over their chests.
Alpha One tapped a module on his forearm.
Two of the Vought operatives stepped forward, unholstering unwieldy looking rifles with parabolic muzzles. These were the Spencer Industries sonic incapacitation arrays.
The operatives aimed the weapons at the checkpoint and pulled the triggers.
A sub audible thrum rippled through the earth, a frequency that bypassed the ears and vibrated directly into the skeletal structure.
At the checkpoint, the four soldiers dropped their weapons instantly. One man let out a shrieking wail, clapping his hands over his ears as thick blood began to pour from his ear canals.
The sonic frequency was designed to rupture equilibrium and liquefy soft tissue. The fluid in their inner ears boiled. Their eyeballs hemorrhaged, turning the whites completely red.
They fell to the concrete, convulsing violently, vomiting blood and stomach acid as their internal organs were subjected to an localized earthquake.
Within ten seconds, the convulsing stopped. Their brains had hemorrhaged under the acoustic pressure.
The Vought team stepped over the bleeding bodies of the sentries, breaching the perimeter gate.
The tactical team spread out into three distinct fireteams.
Team Bravo moved toward the enlisted barracks. It was a single story concrete building housing over two hundred sleeping soldiers.
They slapped flat, disc shaped breaching charges onto the reinforced steel doors and the exterior walls.
The simultaneous detonations blew the doors inward, sending shrapnel tearing through the first row of bunks. The explosion jolted the soldiers awake in a nightmare of fire and smoke.
Men screamed, scrambling from their bunks in their underwear, desperately reaching for their locked weapon racks.
Team Bravo stepped through the smoke, their Spencer Arms assault rifles raised. The rifles fired armor piercing ammunition at a cyclic rate of twelve hundred rounds per minute.
The Vought operatives walked down the center aisle of the barracks, their muzzles flashing in the darkness.
The high caliber rounds tore through the thin mattresses, through the metal bed frames and through the soft flesh of the soldiers.
Men were cut to pieces before they could even stand up. Blood sprayed across the institutional white walls in wet arcs.
A young private, no older than nineteen, managed to rack the slide of a pistol. He popped up from behind a footlocker, aiming wildly at the black armored figures.
A Vought operative tracked his rifle and fired a three round burst. The bullets impacted the private’s chest, tearing through his sternum and out his back, throwing his lifeless body against the wall.
The operatives tossed incendiary grenades, thermite based explosives... into the corners of the barracks as they moved. The chemicals ignited with blinding white intensity, burning at four thousand degrees.
Mattresses caught fire. Flesh caught fire. The screams of the wounded were drowned out by the roaring inferno and the relentless chatter of the assault rifles.
Outside, Team Charlie was neutralizing the motor pool.
Military mechanics and night watch personnel were scrambling toward the armored vehicles, desperately trying to mount a defense.
The Vought operatives deployed shoulder fired micro missiles. The projectiles snaked through the air, locking onto the thermal heat of the Bradley Fighting Vehicles’ engines.
The armored personnel carriers erupted into fireballs, their ammunition stores cooking off in spectacular secondary explosions.
Shrapnel the size of dinner plates rained down on the frantic soldiers, severing limbs and crushing skulls.
A mechanic screamed as a piece of burning tank tread pinned him to the asphalt, his legs severed at the thighs.
A Vought operative walked past him, aimed a tactical shotgun equipped with explosive slug rounds at the man’s head and pulled the trigger, erasing his misery and his face in a single blast.
The base was descending into apocalyptic chaos. Sirens blared, their wails cutting through the night.
The smell of burning diesel, roasted meat and the coppery tang of thousands of gallons of spilled blood choked the cold mountain air.
The ten Vought operatives moved like angels of death, their advanced armor shrugging off the uncoordinated small arms fire from the surviving soldiers.
They were a perfectly oiled machine of murder, executing Stan Edgar’s order to burn the military’s secret army to the bedrock.
