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  BLOOD WAR: FIGHT

  Doug Burbey & Mel Todd

  Bad Ash Publishing

  Atlanta, Georgia

  Copyright © 2018 by Doug Burbey and Melisa Todd

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Bad Ash Publishing

  Powder Springs, GA 30127

  www.badashpublishing.com

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Book Layout © 2017 BookDesignTemplates.com

  Book Title/ Author Name. -- 1st ed.

  ISBN ebook only

  To all veteran everywhere. In memory of USAF Capt. (Ret) David Burbey. A father and warrior, who never forgot. I'll see you again on the High Ground, Dad.

  The only goal, of every soldier, needs to be to kill demons until they are killed themselves. No matter the consequences to what, or who, is in the way.

  ―LTC Declan Kenner, Commander, 1st SSAU

  CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 1

  Blood Begins, 0745 April 13, 2014, Pentagon EOC

  Major Declan Kenner swiped his military identification card through the digital reader and signed in to the Emergency Operation Center at the Pentagon, commonly called the EOC. He didn't exactly dread this shift, but as a mid-grade infantry officer, you had to do your time in a staff assignment while waiting for promotions and possibly a new command opportunity. The EOC wasn't the worst place to be a staff puke but he'd rather be with troops doing real missions, not being a paper pusher. The EOC let him stay in tune with the status of the various missions being run by the Department of Defense. Even if boring, it was better than being stuck in even more boring staff assignments, like a bunch of his buddies who were waiting for the results of their promotion or command selection boards. His best friend, Major Shane Gris, got stuck in Minnesota doing a purgatory assignment as a training evaluator.

  Declan grinned, imagining his oldest friend walking through the woods bored to tears. A clipboard in one hand and a coffee thermos in the other, yelling at soldiers for standing too close together or making too much noise as they trained in the woods.

  Sucks to be him. Here at least I get to watch live satellite feeds, aerial reconnaissance vehicle sorties, and intelligence surveillance images from the world's hot spot missions in real time. It could be worse.

  Declan set his backpack on the floor next to his chair at his terminal workstation. He pulled out his coffee thermos, setting it by his keyboard, as he got settled in and looked up the rows towards his boss. All the workstations were in semicircular rows stacked one behind each other on a rising platform like an amphitheater. The workstations were oriented towards the front of the room where twenty large flat screen TVs made up the information wall. At the top of the auditorium sat the Officer in Charge, or OIC. Today Colonel Brandon Grubs had the duty. As the shift's commander, he would designate the priority areas for each shift. The OIC had the authority to decide when to call in the General Officers, or in extreme cases even the Secretary of Defense and President of the United States.

  Declan keyed his headset, talking casually. "Colonel Grubs, anything hot today?"

  The Colonel responded immediately in Declan's headset. "Negative, Kenner. You're still on Central Command North watch so tie in with the African Command watch desk. No operations are pending in the next eight hours, so it should be a quiet shift for you." His voice sounded bored. On most days nothing really exciting happened.

  "Rodger, sir, I'll try not to nod off," Declan responded as he filled up his travel mug from his thermos. He remembered to make sure the mug's lid was on tight. The Sergeant Major would have his ass if he saw him drinking anything in 'His' war room without a secured lid on it.

  God forbid any coffee got spilled on the carpet. The entire Pentagon would come to a grinding halt.

  "You do that, Kenner. Now go away, I have slides to work on for my PowerPoint Ranger certification. I'm up for my fifth award this quarter." Colonel Grubs sarcastically replied as he stared down at his keyboard then grumbled to himself. "Where's that squiggly line key thing?"

  Declan chuckled at the thought of how making briefing slides, instead of fighting terrorists, annoyed the crap out of the Colonel. "Yes, sir, you enjoy that." Then he muted his headset.

  Crap, nothing cool ever happens on my shift.

  Declan pulled up six of his standard feeds onto his left station video monitor and then opened his end of watch slide template computer file that he'd have to submit in six hours for the shift change battle update brief, called the BUB.

  My life now revolves around a BUB slide that is mostly just cut and paste from the last shift's input anyway. Joy…

  Already bored, five minutes into his shift, Declan sat and drummed his fingers on his desk not really in the mood to play with his PowerPoint slide that wasn't due for hours anyway. He keyed the Air Coordination Cell officer's internal headset number. "Hey, Koche?"

  "Whaaat Kenner? I'm swamped over here." A voice responded in his headset with feigned annoyance.

  Declan glanced over at his friend two rows over. "Bullshit, I can see you playing minesweeper on your terminal from here."

  Major Joel Koche, United States Air Force, swiveled his chair and smiled in Declan's direction. "I've tried to explain this to you knuckle-dragging ground pounding Neanderthals before. Minesweeper is a complex analytical model that allows us more nuanced skillset personnel to train our minds to think in layers of risk and reward through a structured planning and execution process."

  "So, in other words, zoomies suck at the good first-person shooter games and would rather just play with themselves." Declan chuckled as he used the standard inter-service rivalry pejorative to describe the members of the Air Force as zoomies.

  "You can zoomie my…" Joel turned back towards the large monitor wall and froze for a second staring at the main monitor wall at the front of the room. "Declan, that's one of yours. Check out the weirdness on screen sixteen."

  "Huh?" Declan swiveled to his left monitor even as he stared at the BBC World News feed showing on the wall screen. He keyed the audio channel to his headset.

  While he waited to connect, Declan read the tagline ticker under the BBC video image that said 'Nenet Halim, BBC Cairo, reporting on the unexplained phenomenon going viral on social media.'

  The audio of the female reporter finally came through his headset.

  ".. as we have seen. As far as we can tell the unexplained glowing oval is just above the surface of the ocean about eight miles off Point Baltim, near the Kafr El-Sheikh Governorate on the north coast of Egypt. Eyewitnesses reported that in the span of just minutes it started as a bright speck in the water and then expanded to a circle over fifty meters wide. It is glowing with colors and swirls like a giant neon disk."

  The reporter pointed away from the beach she stood on, the mid-day Egyptian sun baking everything, towards the ocean and fired off something rapid in Egyptian that Declan didn't understand. In
response, the image zoomed in towards the ocean highlighting a glowing object in the distance.

  Declan keyed the OIC's intercom, "Sir, do we have anything going on in Kafr El Sheikh?"

  "No. Nada. Zip. Why?"

  "Maybe nothing, sir, but I'd like to put screen sixteen up on the main wall's large center screen. I'm wondering if maybe the Egyptians or Israelis are getting into something near Point Baltim."

  "Sure, why not. It's a slow morning. Hell, put it up on central audio too." Colonel Grubs took off his headset and nodded to the communications specialist at the end of his row who rapidly typed on his keyboard as the news feed transferred to the larger center wall screen and the audio began to come through the room's overhead speakers. The reporter's voice filled the EOC as shift personnel oriented their chairs to watch her on the main screen.

  "While we can't see much beyond the glow from here on shore, live streams from social media accounts are providing us a clearer picture. Pleasure boats nearer the event in the Mediterranean are video streaming what is happening live. I am getting word from London that we will now be broadcasting one of those amateur feeds." Her English clear with a soft accent, but something lurked in the back of her eyes.

  Excitement? Fear?

  The image of the reporter was replaced by the network's live camera view that bounced up and down. Obviously a phone feed, but the quality wasn't bad. The camera holder appeared to be trying to focus on a spot nearby and off the side of a leisure boat.

  "Damn people, get that shit off the screen you going to make me seasick over here," the shift's CIA analyst Mr. Jones, chimed in from the front row.

  "Shut up and suck it up, Jones." Colonel Grubs barked from his desk.

  Declan watched as the live webcast continued. The foreign language of the animated speaker holding the camera was incomprehensible to him, but as the boat with the camera holder got closer to the object the sea started to smooth out and the object of everyone's curiosity came into focus.

  "Wooooo, that's new," Koche commented from his workstation.

  Colonel Grubs pointed at the screen with the ubiquitous military officer knife hand gesture. "Jones, what in the fuck is that thing?"

  The CIA analyst furiously typed on his terminal, watching the screen intently, not even bothering to look at what he typed. "Colonel, give me a second. I'm capturing screenshots now and sending to Langley. I've never seen anything like it before."

  Declan watched the giant glowing disk on the screen, now zoomed in on by the feed source, as the room began to buzz with conversations around him. The object seemed to be a huge, flat, space warping circle with its bottom third apparently underwater. The ocean had become a smooth sheet of perfectly still water around the vertical ring standing there. The ring's color shifting began to slow and then started to turn almost opaque.

  Is there something….

  "Damn it, Jones, this looks like spy shit. This is why you're here. Get me answers." Grubs barked, but Declan noted the colonel never looked away from the screen.

  "Colonel, I sent the image to Langley for my technicians, and also to Fort Mead, to queue up the NSA and NRO folks for their thoughts." Jones didn't apologize, but he still typed rapidly.

  "So, what do you think? Iranian, Israeli, Russian? Hell, French?" Grubs demanded, this time turning to glare at Jones.

  "Colonel, I don't even know what it is. So how do you think I would possibly know what country it's from?" Jones snapped back.

  "Now listen here spy boy…" Colonel Grubs started to stand up and point at the CIA analyst.

  "Sir….SIR!" Declan interrupted his boss.

  "What Major?!" Grubs shifted his glare to Declan.

  "Sir, I think something is coming out of that thing." Declan pointed at the screen in the center of the room.

  The room went silent as a large flat-topped barge like object, constructed of some form of dark twisted metal, slid out of the glowing ring and pushed forward into the ocean causing ripples in the water that quickly subsided unnaturally. The barge seemed to be about seventy-five to one-hundred-feet-long as it cleared the ring's surface and stopped. It floated on the ocean surface directly in front of the ring.

  The Colonel reached for his desk phone slowly while watching the screen as the rest of the EOC sat silent, riveted with what they were seeing.

  The first barge shuddered as it was impacted from behind by a second barge that had just begun exiting the ring. The new barge connected to the first barge somehow and then began to move forward. Both barge segments then slid forward as a third barge followed the second's emergence and began to surge forward at a quickening pace followed by a fourth.

  "That looks some weird ass type of pontoon bridge. Like the kind, we use to move armored vehicles across rivers. Where the hell are those barges coming from?" Declan said more to himself than anyone in particular.

  This has got to be a hoax.

  Declan glanced at the other feeds, but they all showed various live web broadcasts of somebody with a phone near enough to catch images confirming that there was something going on out there. While not identical they were consistent.

  Colonel Grubs picked up his desk phone, "Shit, Kenner may be on to something. That is a fucking bridge being assembled. They may look like hammered scrap metal barges, half melted and welded together by drunk monkeys, but I've crossed enough of them to know what a heavy ribbon bridge is. Jones, pass that on to whoever your people pass things on to."

  "On it, Colonel." Jones continued typing and began speaking to someone rapidly on his telephone.

  The shift officers all turned and looked at the colonel for direction.

  Colonel Grubs sighed. "All right folks. The how and the what, of that thing…. Well, I have no idea. What we do know is that somebody, somehow, is building a heavy assault bridge off the coast of Egypt. It's pointed towards Cairo from off the coast and it's getting built faster by the minute. Egypt is an ally, so we need to be ready to help. So, for now, dial up the Central Command, Africa Command, and European Command EOCs and tell them to gear up. Until we get more guidance, I want the Navy, and then the Air Force, preparing to move in their Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance assets."

  Moving ISR assets was expensive, but they could get information without risking people, so Colonel Grubs continued issuing the orders. "I can't brief the Secretary of Defense citing only social media webcam pictures as my intelligence source. Jones, get the spooky folks digging in for the human intelligence factor to see if somebody knows what this is. Kenner, get on the line to Vicenza, Italy. I want the Airborne Brigade from the Southern European Task Force on the green ramp staged and ready for an airborne drop into Egypt if our President is asked to assist. After that, I think we need to stay focused on ISR assets. I hope that damn thing isn't radioactive. If this is, in fact, a threat, then the designated Combatant Commander will take over from there and we go back into our support role for the big bosses."

  Declan turned back to his terminal then started on the list of things the Colonel had just ordered him to do.

  Crap, why does everything happen on my shift?

  Chapter 2

  Unprepared, 0815 April 13, 2014, Pentagon EOC

  Declan pressed send on the secure email orders for the Southern European Task Force, pronounced sea-taf, and felt a guilty wave of staff officer power. Unit commander's always thought they were making the decisions. In reality the countless staff officers, like Declan now, were really the puppeteers pulling the strings to make things happen. PowerPoint briefings and emails were their weapons. A few minutes after he hit send on his email, all around Vicenza Italy where the task force was based, phones rang, text messages flew, and emails sent out the operations orders based off the Task Forces standard operating procedures. Soldiers started to arrive at the airfields in uniform with their pre-staged equipment waiting, aircraft crews started preflight checks, vehicles and ammunition were moved so they could be loaded onto the aircraft and then the soldiers started rigging t
hemselves for a combat airdrop.

  Oh fuck, people are gonna be pissed if this is all just a joke. But hey, it's midafternoon over there. Not likes it's 0345 on a Saturday or anything.

  "Heads up! Look at this people." Sergeant Major Glen Boozemer had moved to sit next to the Colonel and watched the screen intently. "What in the name of God? Holy Mary full of grace…" His voice dropped to a whisper even as his mouth kept moving.

  Declan watched in shock as the senior noncommissioned officer made the sign of the cross over his chest. He turned to look at the screen. There a steady stream of bulky watercraft had started to pour out of the ring alongside the ever-expanding barge bridge. The newly emerged vehicles seem to be a crossbreed of something organic and something metal. But the engineering just seemed wrong. As if someone took a nine-year old's cartoon rendering of a steampunk pirate ship and had made it into a sort of living machine. The purpose of the vehicles was clear though. They were definitely some form of transport craft. They moved forward over the water with something packed in tightly, totally filling the open cargo wells of the craft.

  Wow, they must be packing hundreds of people in each of those landing craft. But I don't think those things are people.

  Then Declan caught up to what everyone else saw as the video operator locked a still frame image of the landing craft contents onto the main screen. They weren't people at all. All those vehicles racing to the Egyptian coast were packed with figures that looked like extremely pissed off, spike-covered, screaming bipedal monstrosities. They were going to reach the beach in minutes and the bridge would be complete within the hour.

  "Colonel, you're going to want to watch this. For the record, this is not at our direction, or a directive from any US Executive office." Mr. Jones said almost apologetically from the front row station.

  "What is not at our direction, Jones?"