The Assault - By Brian Falkner
PROLOGUE
THIS IS NOT A HISTORY BOOK.
The achievements of 4th Reconnaissance Team (designation: Angel) of the Allied Combined Operations Group, 1st Reconnaissance Battalion, from November 2030 through July 2035, during the Great Bzadian War, are well documented by scholars and historians. Less well known are the people behind the myth: the brave young men and women who earned the reputation and the citations for which Team Angel became famous.
These are their stories, pieced together from Post-Action Reports and interviews with the surviving members of the team. The stories of the heroes whose skills, daring, and determination changed the course of history.
Where necessary, to gain a full understanding of the situations that these soldiers faced, accounts have been included from the forces they opposed: from interviews with prisoners and Bzadian reports of the battles.
The members of Recon Team Angel changed over time, due to injury and death, as you would expect in a combat arena. By the end of the war, over seventy young people had served in the unit. They were ages fourteen to eighteen—small enough to pass themselves off as alien soldiers but old enough to undertake high-risk covert operations behind enemy lines.
At its peak, this remarkable group boasted a core of twenty-five specialist operatives. But in the beginning there were only six:
Angel One: Lieutenant Ryan (Lucky) Chisnall— United States of America
Angel Two: Sergeant Holly Brogan—Australia
Angel Three: Specialist Stephen (Hunter) Huntington—United Kingdom
Angel Four: Specialist Janos (Monster) Panyoczki—Hungary
Angel Five: Private First Class Blake Wilton— Canada
Angel Six: Private First Class Trianne (Phantom) Price—New Zealand
May we always remember the names of those who fell in the pursuit of liberty for Earth.
1. WHERE ANGELS FEAR
[MISSION DAY 1]
[2335 hours local time]
[F-35 Lightning II Stealth Bomber, somewhere over the center of Australia]
“ANGEL CHARIOT, THIS IS HEAVEN. HOW COPY?”
“Heaven, this is Angel Chariot, clear copy, over.”
“Angel Chariot, we have zero five bogies now airborne in your proximity. Repeat, zero five bogies. Expect enemy craft approaching from your six. Anticipate interception in one seven mikes, confirm.”
“Angel Chariot confirming zero five bogies, interception in one seven mikes.”
“Confirmation acknowledged, Angel Chariot. Proceed as planned. Good luck. Out.”
The voices in his ear fell silent, and Lieutenant Ryan Chisnall glanced around at the vague shadows that were the five other members of his team, crouched together in the impossibly small space in the bomb bay of the aircraft. A space that was not designed to hold human beings.
The other members of the team couldn’t hear the voices of the pilot (snug in the cockpit somewhere above them) and their mission controller (safe thousands of miles away at the Operational Command Center). Only Chisnall had a link to this channel, so the others did not know that five enemy jets were heading their way and the first would be right on their tail in less than seventeen minutes.
He decided not to tell them.
A ripple of fear welled up from his gut, stretching dark fingers out around his chest. His heart began to race as a tingling sensation spread from his fingertips to his shoulders.
He took a deep breath and expelled it slowly, humming to himself as he did. Panic, not the circumstances, was the killer. That was what his combat instructor had rammed home again and again. Fear is your friend, keeping you sharp. But panic is the unclean spirit, twisting your soul, consuming logic, training, and, finally, you. So Chisnall hummed to himself and, in doing so, banished the panic to the far corners of his mind.
“Okay, final sys-checks,” he said in a steady voice.
The noise inside the fuselage of the plane would have deafened a corpse. The bomb bay had been heated and pressurized for this mission, but not soundproofed. With the continuous roar from the other side of the bomb bay doors, it was like being in front of the speakers at a thrash metal concert. If they hadn’t all been wearing comm units, talk would have been impossible.
One by one, each of the team members’ systems checks came up on his HMDS. Five of them had sys-OK, including him, but one was showing a problem.
“Angel Three, you’re showing a helmet breach. What’s going on, Hunter?” Chisnall could barely see Specialist Stephen “Hunter” Huntington, although he was no more than a few feet away from him. The darkness in the fuselage was almost absolute. The only light came from the ready lights on the six half-pipes on the floor beneath their feet.
“Just scratchin’ my nose, Angel One,” Hunter replied, and his sys-check lit up before he finished speaking.
“Picking your nose, you