came out as a Bzadian buzz. “Ozz-trail-yuh.”
His promotion to the Republican Guards had been hard earned. Months on the front lines. One vicious battle after another. Many of his soldiers were lost as the humans dug their toes in and refused to give up ground.
Yozi listened to the discordant music of the sandstorm outside and was glad that he was inside the secure stone walls of the officers’ quarters. Hopefully the storm will have subsided before he was due to go on patrol at first light.
After a while, the others hunkered down and tried to get some shut-eye. Chisnall just listened to the raging sand winds above and thought through the plans for the mission. Was it possible that someone on his team was a traitor to the human race?
He ran through the list of suspects in his mind. It was a pretty small list.
Hunter. English. If there was ever a soldier you’d want to have at your side in a difficult situation, it was Stephen Huntington. Never afraid of a fight, no matter what the consequences, and he’d usually be the last man standing.
Hunter had been hardened like steel, forged in the fires that were the British refugee camps in Massachusetts and Maine. With the fall of Great Britain, he and his working-class family were abruptly thrust into a tent ghetto. Somehow they survived the harsh Maine winters and a society ruled by the fist and the broken bottle.
Amid the grime of the unpaved streets, Hunter had cracked knuckles until he was the one everyone—even the adults—feared. Hunter had confessed to Chisnall that he would have killed or been killed if he hadn’t been hauled off by the “coppers” and sent to a juvenile hall.
It was there that his prowess at paintball was noticed.
The army had given Hunter discipline. Had shaped his steel into a deadly sword.
Holly Brogan was Chisnall’s sergeant and the only trained medic on the team. Tough, capable, deadly, and gorgeous. She looked like a cheerleader but was the battalion’s unarmed combat champion. Look like a butterfly, sting like a bee, Chisnall had thought when he first saw her fight.
Brogan was Australian. Her country was overrun, her parents killed. If anybody had a reason to hate the aliens, she did. But she didn’t let emotion control her actions. Not at all. She was clinical in everything she did. She was a by-the-book soldier, but the “book” that she followed existed for a reason. Many men and women had died so that the military could develop methods and rules for combat. She had never been selected for officer school, which surprised Chisnall, but she had quickly earned promotion to sergeant and was invaluable in that role. This mission was a chance for her to strike back at those who had killed her parents.
Trianne Price was a ghost. The Kiwi Phantom. She could move through the night like a soft breath of wind, and even if you were looking for her, you would be lucky to notice that she was there. You never saw her coming; you never knew she’d been. That ability had got her selected for this, the first ever Angel Team recon operation. Chisnall knew little about her except that she had had a tough childhood. There were scars on the light coffee-colored skin of her arms, some of which looked like cigarette burns. She seldom talked about her upbringing, but, like Hunter, she had been forged in the fires of her youth. Her way of avoiding pain was to simply avoid being seen. To not be noticed. She was very good at it.
But it was strange how the Bzadians had left New Zealand alone. A small country, sure, but right on their doorstep. It would have been like taking candy from a baby. Yet they hadn’t. Could the New Zealand government have entered in some kind of secret pact with the aliens? It seemed unlikely.
Blake Wilton was Canadian. A champion snowboarder with an unusually wide face and small eyes. Wilton had been selected for one reason only. He was the best shot in the battalion, and that included the adult soldiers in the other recon teams. A specialist sharpshooter, but kind of a weird guy. He operated on a different wavelength than the rest of the team. Chisnall often thought Wilton felt he had to prove himself as tough as the others in order to be accepted. But it really wasn’t that that set him apart—he was just a little different. Chisnall had had