Alpha Contracts Read online

  “Look at it this way. The mercenary companies are businesses. If they weren’t good at what they did, they would either go out of business or be killed, which, for mercenaries, is the same thing. They have had this system for hundreds, probably thousands of years. In this time, I suspect that a survival-of-the-fittest process would have weeded out the incompetents and the posers. Those that remain are the ones best suited to fighting and killing.”

  “That was what I thought, too.”

  “You are right to think that way. Having seen them in action, they are formidable. Each of their soldiers is almost like a tank—well armed and armored compared with our troopers. Also, their laser rifles are much more powerful than most of our weapons. I have fought many battles in my life, and I can tell you that they beat us, not because we didn’t have pretty weapons like the Americans, but because they fight on a different level of warfare than anyone on Earth. If they had landed in your New York City, the results would have been the same. You Americans might have killed a few more of them, but then they would have destroyed you. They are unbeatable in the air, and nearly so on the ground.”

  “That’s what I was afraid of.”

  “And yet, you still intend to go?”

  “I do. This represents a challenge unlike any I’ve ever had before and a way of testing myself and my company against the best the galaxy has to offer. I don’t want to walk into this blindly, though; I want to know what I’m getting into ahead of time and have a plan for being successful in whatever contract we take.”

  “I see,” Shirazi said. “We view contact with the Galactic Union somewhat differently from you. Where you have just seen it on television, we have lived it most intimately,” he gestured, indicating the destruction all around them. “I think, perhaps, it’s important for you to understand—to truly understand—our perspective on interstellar relations and what the aliens mean to us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Shirazi stood and said something in Arabic to one of the junior troopers, who ran out of the room. “Come with me.” The colonel left the room and went back out onto the tarmac, where there was a staff car waiting. A junior enlisted held the door for them and Shirazi climbed into the back seat. He chuckled when the Americans appeared reluctant to get into the car.

  “Do not worry,” he said, “I am not planning on kidnapping you. If I were, I could easily have taken you inside the building and then destroyed your aircraft.” His voice took on a sharper edge. “Get in. No harm will come to you; you have my word. I want to show you something.”

  The two Americans entered the car, and it drove off down the aircraft taxiway to the last hangar. At the back of the hangar was a ramp down to an underground shelter. The Americans looked at each other, stunned that they were getting to see some of the areas of the airfield that would normally have been “off limits” to foreigners. The car pulled into a large, well-lit area, big enough to park a large fighter aircraft and conduct maintenance on it. Based on the tools and equipment in evidence, that’s exactly what was done there...on a normal day.

  But not today. Klieg lights illuminated the far corner of the bay, and the Americans could see what looked like a jail cell had been set up, with a 15-foot high roof. Something blue moved within, and the Americans’ eyes widened in shock. Shirazi smiled as the car stopped in front of the cage. “Yes, we have one of them.”

  The men got out of the car, and the two Americans approached the cage, being careful to stay outside the alien’s reach. “What are you doing with it? Cartwright asked. “Can it understand us?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” Shirazi said, frowning. “It would have been nice to have one of the translation pendants they have, but this one didn’t have one when it was captured, and I didn’t want word of its capture to get out. That was unfortunate; I have many questions I would have liked to have asked it.” His tone indicated the questioning would not have been pleasant for the MinSha.

  “To see one this close is almost overwhelming,” Cartwright said. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “More importantly,” the gunnery sergeant said, speaking for the first time, “There’s been an awful lot of talking, but what I’d really like to know is if you’ve figured out how to kill them.”

  “Is that so?” Shirazi asked, his eyes staring piercingly into Ted’s. In the American’s eyes, he saw someone who was not afraid of doing what it took to get the job done. Shirazi nodded almost imperceptibly, drew his pistol, and stepped slightly closer to the cage. “This doesn’t work,” he said. He fired a round, and it sparked off the shin of one of the alien’s legs and ricocheted off with a whine. Cartwright ducked subconsciously, but neither Shirazi nor the gunnery sergeant flinched.

  “What does?” Ted asked.

  “This.” Shirazi holstered the pistol, and walked over to a set of shelves, returning with an AK-47. He aimed and fired once, and the MinSha dropped to the floor where it lay twitching. “You have to shoot it through the eyes if you want to kill it with a normal rifle,” Shirazi noted. “Especially if they have armor on.”

  He walked back to the shelves, set down the rifle, and came back with several chunks of what looked like hard blue plastic. Plastic that was colored the same as the prisoner, whose twitching had almost stopped. He handed them to Cartwright.

  “Is this what I think it is?” he asked.

  “It is,” Shirazi said. “That is part of the carapace of one of the ones we killed. For five million dollars, American, you can have them to do with as you please, as long as you do not tell anyone where you got them.”

  * * *

  The Ilyushin-76 trundled down the runway. Without any cargo, it picked up speed quickly and was airborne by mid-field.

  “Good riddance,” the staff car driver said.

  “Indeed,” Colonel Shirazi said. “I hope to never see them across from me on the field of battle.”

  “Why is that, sir? He’s an American. Don’t you want to kill him?”

  “Wanting someone dead is very different than actually wanting to try to kill them. I have a feeling those men would be very hard to kill. The leader is both smart and wise, and would be a dangerous enemy. The soldier with him is also a dangerous man, and would be hard to get past to even have a chance at killing the leader.” He paused as a tractor went by, bringing in one of the pallets of aid the Americans had left, and then added, “No, I am happy if he goes off to space and kills many aliens before they ultimately do the same to him.”

  “Do you think he told the truth about what they were doing?”

  “He definitely told pieces of the truth, as much as we would need to verify who he was and what he was doing, but I strongly doubt he told us everything.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I didn’t tell him everything we knew, either.”

  * * * * *

  Asbaran Solutions - 6

  Colonel Shirazi sighed inwardly as the imam walked into the presentation room. Although he had prayed most fervently that the cleric would cancel, he hadn’t.

  “Here is the current status,” Shirazi said, bring up the first slide with a mental grimace. “As I’ve noted previously, we hold an area of about 10,000 square kilometers. Although the radiation levels have been dying down, allowing us to reclaim some of the land to the north, most of the land we’ve recovered so far isn’t very valuable; it isn’t good for either farming or animal husbandry, and the area will need to be cleansed of fallout before people can live there again. We are mostly left with the same area we started with, which goes from the Konarak air base on the other side of Chabahar Bay east to the Pakistani border, and then north for just over 100 kilometers to the town of Pishin.

  “To hold this area, we have a battalion of 60 tanks and a battalion of mechanized infantry, which is just over 500 personnel. We also have a special forces company of about 75 additional men, but they are generally not frontline fighters.”

  “They are spread pretty thin,” the imam noted. “Fi
ve hundred personnel to guard a 100-kilometer border?”

  “While it might seem so at first glance,” the general replied, “it’s important to note that there are only two roads that cross into Pakistan. Any attack of note would have to come down one of those. If it didn’t, we could reposition our troops to block any incursion, assuming we had sufficient notice of it happening.”

  “What is ‘sufficient notice?’”

  “We have squads patrolling up and down the border, augmented by a number of unmanned aerial vehicles. If we see any forces starting to build on the Pakistani side, we can move the bulk of our forces to oppose them.”

  “Okay,” the cleric said, seeming mollified.

  “Even once the airborne radiation clears to the north, the Pakistanis will have a hard time getting their forces in-country,” Shirazi added. “The road network primarily goes through the major cities, and they are all slagged. It will be hard to move significant forces down from the north, especially since they will have to deal with surface-based radiation for quite some time.”

  “So the situation is grim, but not untenable,” Imam Turhani said.

  “That is correct,” Colonel Shirazi replied. “We can also use some of the police to help patrol the border, as well as call up the militia, at least for a while. I also have to note that the northern part of Pakistan that shares a border with us received a large dose of fallout, and they will have to work to recover from that, too.”

  He flipped the slide. “I’ve had my logistics personnel look at the food supply, and we are okay in this area, as well. We have a lot of land under cultivation, and will be able to continue to feed our people with what we grow, what we can fish out of the Gulf of Oman, and what we can import.” He flipped the slide.

  “Where we are going to be deficient is in oil and industrial products. Until we can get some of the pipelines back into service, oil and gas are going to be in short supply as we will have to import all that we use. Similarly, there isn’t a large industrial base in Chabahar, so any of those products will have to be brought in by either air or sea. While we have increased the port facilities recently, with the help of India, it will be difficult to import everything we need to continue our normal way of life.”

  “I have been approached by the Indian foreign minister,” the imam said. “He asked where the nation of India can help us best.”

  “We need to be careful with accepting too much aid from India,” the general said. “If Pakistan starts to see us as too big of an Indian surrogate state, they might very well attack us. I would advise caution before we become too dependent on Indian support.”

  “What if they were to send us some of their military forces to help defend us?” the imam asked.

  “No!” both the general and Colonel Shirazi exclaimed simultaneously. “Sorry,” Colonel Shirazi said to the general. “Please, go ahead, sir.”

  “Having Indian forces would definitely make us a target,” the general said. “India and Pakistan have border skirmishes all the time. All it would take is one small provocation and the Pakistanis would come across the border and wipe us out. I would strongly advise not accepting any Indian military aid.”

  “Getting back to the problem at hand,” Colonel Shirazi said, flipping to the next slide, “as you can see, we are low on capital, and we have a large number of infrastructure demands that will have to be satisfied if we are to be successful long-term. We need major improvements to Konarak Airport and the road network to get there. It’s 30 kilometers to the airport, half of which is on secondary roads. All of our port facilities will have to be substantially upgraded. All of this will also require fuel, and lots of it.

  “And all of this is going to require even more money. While we have a number of tourist facilities that will bring in some capital, it is nowhere near the infusion of cash that we need, right now, if we are to continue—”

  “Colonel, you have very adequately detailed our deficiencies,” the imam said. “I hope you have a plan, because the only solution to me appears to be Indian assistance, and you have already explained why that is infeasible. Where do we look for these large amounts of cash? The western world would be happy if we failed, and they could come in and take us over. They might even provide money, so that we would be indebted to them, and they could control us that way.”

  “I would sooner take a loan from a MinSha than I would the United States,” Colonel Shirazi replied. “With the rest of the western world, it would be about equal odds.”

  “What about our Saudi brothers or fellow Sunni Muslim nations?” the imam asked. “Can we look to them for aid?”

  “They might provide aid,” Colonel Shirazi replied, “and I would be far more likely to accept it from them. The problem with that is it also leaves us beholden to foreigners, rather than masters of our own destiny. All things being equal, I would rather we control what we do, rather than having foreign bankers—even Sunni ones—telling us what we should do with our country.”

  “You have already explained we don’t have many resources of our own,” the imam noted. “How do you intend for us to pay for all of the improvements you say we need, if we don’t have the resources, and we don’t whore ourselves out to foreigners to get it?”

  “We do have one resource I haven’t covered yet…” the colonel replied. His voice trailed off, and he sighed. “I haven’t had a chance to brief the general yet, but I have come up with a potential solution, which will, I think, solve all of our problems.”

  The general raised his eyebrows. “I have always known you to be an honest and hardworking man,” he said. “Go ahead and present your solution.”

  Colonel Shirazi turned off the projector and stepped in front of the podium to stand in front of the military and civil leaders. “Imam Jomeh Turhani, General Pahlavi, we have one other resource I haven’t mentioned. It is this—we have people who are willing to fight and die for our country, this new country we are building. I, for one, volunteer my services, as I am sure the majority of my forces will.”

  The imam’s eyebrows knit. “I’m not sure I understand,” he said after a moment. “You are already in the military. What services are you talking about?”

  The general seemed no less confused, in spite of his military background. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “It seems like you are talking about perhaps providing mercenary services to bring in additional revenue, but I cannot afford to let you go—it would weaken the border too much—nor would it bring in that much money. Mercenaries just don’t get paid that much.”

  “In the past, no,” Colonel Shirazi agreed. He turned on the television and pressed play on the recorder.

  “Jim Salazar here,” the announcer said. “I’m here at the World Government offices, where Ambassador Thales just gave a presentation on a surprising new opportunity that the Galactic Union has offered Earth’s military forces. The Mercenary Guild of the Galactic Union will be sending representatives with mercenary contracts that will be available for us to bid on. Although the retainer to acquire them is expected to be high, the payoffs for successfully completing them are in the millions of Galactic credits, or billions of U.S. dollars. The national armies of many former countries are already lining up for them, as well as many prominent mercenary organizations.”

  Shirazi turned off the television. “I believe this would solve our problems, if we are bold enough to pursue it. I propose to form a mercenary unit from one of our companies, as well as the special forces platoon.” The special forces company had been sent north to recover Iran’s nuclear weapons from a number of sites. Some of their protective suits had proven…inadequate for the task, and a number of casualties had ensued, leaving the army with only a platoon.

  “I saw a little more of that speech,” the general said. “Even if we decided to let you go—which I don’t recommend—we still don’t have a formal government. Don’t the units need some sort of governmental sponsorship?”

  “They do,” Shirazi s
aid with a nod. “That is what I meant by being bold. It is time to put the past government behind us and stop arguing with the other pockets of former Iran over who has primacy. I say, let them have it. I propose we break with the rest of the country and form our own country, with our own government. I would organize a mercenary unit of our troops under the auspices of the nation of New Persia, as led by President Turhani and Vice President Pahlavi. If we use those titles, and say that we will hold new elections to confirm them, the west will see us as a democracy and will stand in line to throw money at our feet. Money that we can use to buy one of these contracts and to start making the infrastructure upgrades we will need to stay relevant in the world. When we complete our mercenary contracts, we will have enough money to be self-sufficient—to make the upgrades we need to be a functioning nation that is nobody’s lackey.”

  “But what if you are unsuccessful?” the general asked. “How do you know you can beat the enemy? We have not done so well against them in the past.”

  “We learned a lot from our captive on how to kill the MinSha, and it is time to begin taking our revenge on them. I believe, if we are smart about what contracts we take, we can be successful. After all, who knows more about fighting the MinSha than we do? And if we are unsuccessful, we will be dead, but you will still have the majority of your forces, and you will still have the other nations trying to help you. You stand to lose little, but the potential for gain is huge.”

  The general still seemed unconvinced, and turned to Imam Turhani, to find a thoughtful look on his face. “President Turhani,” the imam jomeh said. “I like the sound of that. I think there are some potential opportunities there…Yes, I believe there are. And I believe many of the other parts of what used to be Iran will rally to our new banner…under our leadership. What do you say, Mr. Vice President?”

  The pensive look faded from the general’s face, and a small smile took its place. “You’re right, Mr. President. There are plenty of opportunities here.”