Captain Wit O’Toole stepped out of the command tent and into the frigid morning air of the Kashmir Valley roughly 350 kilometers west of the Chinese border. To the east the sun was just beginning to rise over the outer Himalayas, casting long shadows across the valley floor and bathing Wit in a golden glow. Soon this would all be snow, a thick blanket of white that would cover the landscape until next summer. But for now it was steep green meadows and thick pine forests and vibrant wildflowers living out their brief existence before the snows came. It was a sight Wit would never tire of seeing. Earth in its purest form. No industry, no buildings, no people. Just mountains and green and a river at the bottom. It was breathtaking and beautiful and worth fighting for.
Wit looked down again at the images on his wrist pad. Three alien landers in China. He flipped the images away and called up a button, one that when pressed would alert everyone in his unit and call them to assembly. Wit pressed it.
Around him were twenty two-man tents, clustered together on the hillside. Almost immediately there was movement inside the tents. Seconds later men began to emerge, their hair unkempt, their clothes disheveled. Many of them were barefoot. But they were all alert and eager for news.
Six hours ago Wit had ordered his men to get some sleep. They would have preferred to stay up and watch the live coverage of the alien ship in space, but they had already been awake for thirty-six hours at that point, and they needed their rest. They were MOPs—or Mobile Operations Police—the most elite special forces unit in the world. Yet even soldiers as skilled and lethal as they were needed sleep.
The men gathered around Wit, some of them wearing only their long underwear, hugging themselves in the morning chill. They were a diverse group. Forty men from thirty different countries. Europeans, Asians, North and South Americans, Africans, Middle Easterners—all of them handpicked from special forces units in their respective countries. They had all discarded their old ranks and uniforms and agreed to represent their country in an international force in which they were all equal and all devoted to a single cause: stop human suffering, anywhere in the world.
Wit thought it unfortunate that there were no Chinese soldiers among them. He could use one right about now. He had tried over the years to recruit from China, but the military there had always patently refused his offer. They would stand independent and not insert themselves into international matters. Or so said the official memo Wit had received from China. He would not have access to their soldiers under any circumstances. Period.
“The aliens have sent three large landing crafts down into China,” said Wit. He removed his holopad from the pouch at his hip and held it in the palm of his hand. He then extended the projection antennas at each of the four corners and turned on the holo. An image of one of the landers appeared in the air. Some of the soldiers in the back strained to look over the heads of those in front of them.
A supply truck was to Wit’s left. He climbed up onto the back bumper to give everyone a better look.
“You can’t tell from the holo,” Wit said, “but these landers are massive, many times larger than the world’s biggest sports arena. Each of them could easily hold tens of thousands of troops or hundreds of aircraft or land vehicles. We don’t yet know what’s inside them. At the moment, they’re just sitting there. They landed only a moment ago.”
“Where in China?” said Calinga. “We’re close to the border.”
“Nowhere near us,” said Wit. “Southeast China, north of Guangzhou.”
“When do we deploy?” asked Calinga.
“I haven’t asked Strategos for orders,” said Wit. “And I won’t be asking them either. In fact, I cut off all communications with Strategos three minutes ago.”
The men exchanged looks.
Strategos was the high commander of the Mobile Operations Police. The general, so to speak. Except, instead of being a single person, Strategos was actually thirty people. Twenty-two men and eight women, each from a different nation, and each with a wealth of experience in black ops and peacekeeping operations. Some had been leaders of intelligence agencies. Others were military leaders still in active duty. Together they identified and planned MOPs missions and gave Wit his orders. Sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council, Strategos was a model of international military cooperation, a fraction of the size of NATO and far more effective on small-scale ops. Where NATO was a show of force, MOPs was a lightning strike, hard and fast and out before the enemy knew what hit him.