The Shift: Book II of the Wildfire Saga (58 page)

Now the ball was in Harris’s court.
 
Barron had given him the information necessary to prevent the catastrophic loss of every man sent into southern California on the upcoming raid.
 
The loss of so many men would leave Harris extremely vulnerable.
 
Barron might not be able to stop Reginald on his own, but
 
now that Harris had the codes, the playing field had been leveled.
 

As James talked about the trash piling up on the streets and how power was starting to fluctuate, Barron smiled, thinking of the mischief Harris could cause with those codes.
 
Reginald was going to be pissed.

If you’re going to play for keeps, you British prick, don’t fuck with a man who has nothing left to lose.

C
HAPTER
29

San Diego, California.

San Diego Public Library.

C
OOPER
CURSED
AS
HE
ducked behind a low wall and leaned back.
 
Another bullet ricocheted off the nearby construction barrier.
 
He slowly leaned around the left corner of the barrier and saw two NKors trying to work their way across 11
^th
Avenue where it intersected Park Boulevard.
 
Two quick, three-round bursts and their legs collapsed.
 
He ducked back around the barrier and listened to their screams.

The NKors were certainly wearing heavy duty body-armor.
 
Nothing like he’d ever seen before.
 
Through frustrating trial and error, he and his team had discovered the only way to take them out was to aim for the face or anywhere below the knees.
 
Otherwise, the little bastards just kept coming and there seemed to be a shit ton of them in San Diego.
 
Cooper had some serious doubts about the success rate of his mission.

“Sparky, talk to me—”

“
Still no contact.
 
It’s like our gear doesn’t even transmit…wait one.
”
 

Cooper heard the crack of the sniper’s rifle and clicked his helmet’s HUD display to see what the team sniper saw.
 
A body in the street.
 
The sniper’s view shifted to another target and jerked as the rifle bucked.
 
Cooper watched the little picture-in-picture window as the target’s head disappeared and the body crumpled to the pavement.
 
He then saw himself, backed-up against the concrete barrier.
 
The NKor had been only a few yards away.

“Time to fall back,” Cooper announced.
 
He switched back from the sniper’s view to his own.
 
There were just too many NKors and not enough SEALs.
 
The mission had been risky—Cooper had known that from the start—but with an entire Marine Expeditionary Unit on their heels, he’d felt confident they could pull it off.
 
All he and his team had needed to do was perform another HAHO jump and infiltrate the NKor base.

Join the Navy, they said.
 
See the world, they said…

Cooper looked to his left and saw another NKor creep around the corner of the burned-out 7-Eleven, trying to flank Jax.
 
He lined up his HK MP5SD and whistled.
 
The enemy soldier looked in his direction an instant before three 9mm rounds dropped him to the ground in a spray of blood.

Gunfire rattled around him as the SEALs slowly fell back toward the San Diego Public Library.
 
The perimeter was collapsing—his team was
 
hemmed in on the west, south, and east.
 
The library was their third expedient fall-back point.
 
Cooper was running out of options and the NKors just kept coming out of the woodwork.

Getting in was the easy part.
Nobody said there’d be this many shock troops.
 
He adjusted the grip on his rifle and checked team POVs using the little picture-in-picture feature of his HUD again.
 
The NKors had acted like they wanted the SEALs to gain entry to the base they were constructing around PetCo Park.
 
There were very few guards and not much of an internal security presence, considering the ball field had been turned into some sort of regional HQ.
 

On their way in, Cooper had spotted a handful of Chinese cargo planes—clearly marked with the Chinese flag, no less—and a small private jet.
 
Their intel had been correct on that point, at least.
 
The Chinese had sent some grand Poobah to meet with the NKor high command.
 
It was the proof the President needed to implicate China in the invasion.
   

It had all been too easy to this point.
 
He should’ve known something was wrong.
 
The intel boys were never
that
good.

Cooper smacked the back of his helmet against the wall in frustration.
 
The HUD crackled and Jax’s view of another dead NKor in the street was tickled by static before snapping back into clarity.
 
I should’ve smelled this trap a mile away.

Everything had gone to shit after they’d wiped out the command staff at PetCo Park.
 
Cooper had snagged all the paperwork he could find: maps, dispatches, reports—he didn’t take the time to examine anything, just grabbed it all.
 
The others had pilfered hard drives and data sticks while Charlie had laced the place with C-4.
   
They’d lit up PetCo Park and disappeared into the night to await the rolling thunder of General Rykker and his Marines.

Then he’d discovered their comms were dead.
 
He could communicate with his team and that was it.
 
After they’d completed their part of the mission—Charlie had mentioned it had been too easy and Cooper had laughed it off.

A helmet bobbed along over the other side of a traffic barrier Jax was using as cover.
 
With the patience developed over a decade of covert ops, Cooper trained his rifle and waited.
 
Come on, just a little further, you little son of a bitch…

“Jax, you got one over your right shoulder, about four yards.
 
Don’t move, I got ‘im.”

“Just be careful where you aim…”

Cooper ignored the jibe and watched, blocking out the gunfire and sounds of battle that echoed down the streets all around him.
 
Eventually the enemy helmet stopped moving about ten feet from Jax and a face appeared over the barrier for a quick peek.
 
Cooper carefully squeezed the trigger and dispatched another NKor.
 

Jax was drawing them in like flies to sugar—he was purposely exposing himself so he could get longer shots down their flank.
 
It was working in that the NKors were having to loop farther south and east.
 
They were now moving into the expansive parking lots of PetCo Park, filled with supply vehicles and construction equipment.
 
It was a good tactic, but the NKors were starting to focus too much on Jax.

“Pull back a little, Jax—you’re attracting too much attention.
 
I can’t cover your ass all day—”

“It’s cool, Coop.
 
There’s a mobile command truck down the street, I think I can—”

An explosion knocked Cooper to the ground.
 
The noise was muffled by his sound-dampening HAHO helmet.
 
For that much, he was grateful—but it couldn’t stop the overpressure.
 
He cursed again as he got to his hands and knees and tried to peer through the gloom of sudden twilight.
 
Smoke, ash, and dust swirled around him.
 
He switched to IR and the world went gray, but at least he could see the buildings and the parked cars that blocked his path to the library.

“
Mortar fire!
” called out Sparky’s voice.
 
The sniper was perched up near the peak of the funky, cage-like structure on top of the San Diego Public Library.
 
“
I got eyes on…I’ll start to loosen ‘em up, but you ladies might want to think about getting the hell out of there.
”

Three barks from his MacMillan TAC-338 and Sparky signaled the all clear.
 
Cooper crept along the crumpled wall until he found Jax.
 
“You okay?”
 
The mortar had landed almost exactly between them and left a small crater in the street.

Jax’s dented HAHO helmet nodded as he slid on his back away from the new opening in his wall.
 
“
That was fun,
” he muttered.

Cooper switched to night vision and scanned the streets.
 
There was still too much smoke.
 
A car, tossed on its side from the mortar round, had burst into flames and continued to feed a thick blanket of black smoke across the street, effectively screening their position.
 
Thank God for small miracles.
 

“Let’s go—they’ll be lobbing some more at us when they realize they missed,” Cooper said, hauling Jax to his feet.

“
Coop, now’s your chance.
 
They can’t see through that smoke anymore than we could without our gear.
 
They’re clustering together on the other side of that intersection to our south
.”

Sparky’s observation from his perch high atop the library made Cooper’s decision easy.
 
Time to go.
 
They had been on the run since the trap had been sprung, three long hours ago.
 
Cooper had known they were on their own when the NKor base suddenly came to life and they discovered hundreds, if not thousands of enemy soldiers pouring in toward their position.
 

His team had completely taken over the command and control building, wiped out the entire command staff—including the Chinese grand Poobah—taken photographic and physical evidence, and sabotaged the NKor comms and defensive network.

There should have been nothing stopping the Marines from rolling into the base and slaughtering everything that moved.
 
It had been the middle of the night, after all.
 
Instead, at 0125 hours, precisely 15 minutes
after
the mission plan called for the Marines to have arrived on-scene, every light on the base turned on, all the buildings emptied of fully-armed soldiers, air-raid sirens wailed, and the Marines never showed.

Cooper and his team found themselves without comms, without Marines, and surrounded by an army of pissed-off North Koreans.
 
There was no other explanation required.
 
It had been a trap.
 
A setup.

The SEALs, however made a quick and bloody evacuation through the enemy forces—after all, this was Naval Base San Diego, so it was like walking through a long-time neighbor’s house—and made their escape.
 
They had home-field advantage.
 
Even still, Cooper and his team barely survived long enough to reach the San Diego Public Library.

The retreat had been costly.
 
He’d lost three men during the flight from the NKor base.
   

Before they left, Admiral Bennet had explained that trainee’s from the current BUD/S class would be added to augment Cooper’s depleted Team.
 
In addition, three veteran SEALs, on sick-leave stateside when the invasion began, were reassigned to Cooper.
 

There’d been no communication from the other Teams located overseas: one in Pakistan, one in Afghanistan.
 
Even if they could be reached and were alive, Admiral Bennet didn’t have much hope they could arrive in time to help fight the invasion.

Cooper ducked again as a lucky shot through the smoke shattered a window behind him.
 
The NKors were definitely moving.
 
He heard a high-pitched whine and looked up into the murky haze.
 
Another mortar screamed overhead.
 
Two more added their noise to the first.
 
“This is it, boys.
 
Everyone inside the library!”

“
Moving
,” said Charlie.
 
“
Maughan is with me.
”

Cooper winced.
 
Charlie was half-supporting, half-training Jack Maughan, one of the trainees.
 
Fresh out of BUD/S, he hadn’t even gone through Hell Week yet.
 
Throwing raw recruits in with the veterans might have made sense to the Brass, but now that everything had gone goat-fuck sideways, the kids were paying the price.
 
Two of their three KIAs were rooks.
 
Cooper added that to his list of discussion topics for Admiral Bennet when—if—he returned to Colorado.