Friday, June 11th, 2004 | 22:00 hrs [UTC+12]
Saweni, Fiji | Blue Dragons Camp
17° 54' 15" S, 177° 46' 54" E
Jacob Bray lowered his 200-pound, 6-foot-one stature into his favorite chair, a wide, wooden, teak recliner that sat on the covered porch of the stilt house that he called his home. It was also his headquarters for Bray was the leader of a 300-man strong guerilla group operating in Fiji. It was one of several but it was also the largest and the most capable of the others. In any other nation, the Blue Dragons would have been laughed at for their miniscule size but on Fiji, they were a commanding presence. Bray, who had once been a colonel in the nation's army, fashioned himself a spokesman for God and led the Blue Dragons as if he were leading a cult though the similarities were striking. Yet as a spokesman for God, Bray was hardly angelic or on any moral high ground.
Sitting on the chair, he caught the sound of whimpers coming from the open window of his bedroom on the adjacent side of the hut. Half of the hut served as his personal quarters, the other as the headquarters for his army. It was a cool enough night that the air conditioning wasn't needed and the rainstorm that had only just blown through fifteen minutes earlier had brought down the temperature and soaked everything with a glistening sheen of moisture. With the clouds breaking overhead, the full moon was beginning to cast its silver rays onto the lush, green carpet that was Fiji's surface. Bray lit a cigarette and leaned back and slouched in his chair. The whimpers continued but he blocked them out, having heard them time after time again.
They came from Laisa, a fifteen year old girl who'd served as his "entertainment" for the evening. Having pressed upon her family that he was a spokesman for God and that she was destined to be held in greatness, plus being backed up by a dozen men with Kalashnikovs, Bray absconded with her several weeks ago. Since then, he'd spent each and every night raping her. He was hardly a pillar of God's word but what was else to be expected of a man as vile as Bray was.
It was thoroughly dark on this night and throughout his camp, roving patrols of disciplined men stood guard. At any given point in time, twenty-seven men were on guard, broken up into three, nine-man teams. One team stood at fixed guard posts, chiefly sandbagged emplacements with machine guns or rocket launchers. One team conducted roving patrols in groups of three and the final team stood as backup. Every two hours they rotated so that no team grew too comfortable or complacent during their eight-hour shift. The camp was otherwise quiet. There were no lights on and no fires burning. The leadership cadre of the Blue Dragons had found their beds for the night and were sleeping, as were the majority of the camp's occupants, save for those on guard duty, Bray, and his unfortunate victim.
Yet tonight was going to be a monumental night for the forty-three-year-old. Lurking barely three hundred meters to the west was a 6-man black operations squad. Collectively, they were known simply as Charlie Squad, Alpha Company, 2nd Black Operations Group. Informally, they went by FORCE Spectre or Spectre Company. They'd been sent to the island nation on direct orders from the Emperor himself to capture Joseph Bray alive and render him back to the Empire to stand trial for a number of crimes, one of which included drug trafficking. The Blue Dragons raised a significant portion of their funding through illicit trafficking and smuggling in the Pacific but their drugs did make it to Hawaii, which was a Layartebian territory. For that reason, capturing Bray and using him as an example had been made a major mission by the Emperor. It had taken months of intelligence-collection but the Blue Dragons' leader had finally been spotted one evening in the village of Saweni, approximately forty-five miles northwest of the capital. The 6-man team had thusly been inserted via submarine and they'd spent the better part of the past forty-eight hours crawling through Fiji towards this village. Now there, they were finally about to begin their mission, having spent the last two-and-a-half hours observing the camp, especially the patrols and where the several emplaced positions were located.
They'd yet to get eyes on Bray but their plan was to move through the camp quietly, killing only those guards on patrol and hiding the bodies as best as they could. They knew which building he was in but also knew that the only avenue of approach was this one for the most direct meant going through a minefield and significant amounts of razor wire. They opted for the easier route, even if that meant going through more guards. Armed with MP5SD3 submachine guns and subsonic ammunition, they aimed to be as quiet as possible. They'd rehearsed the assault several times already on a purpose-built camp in the jungles of New Caledonia, where satellites couldn't see them and where they encountered a similar environment. Even during their submarine transit, the men were rehearsing their assault during "role-play" sessions in the mess hall. They'd broken everything down to muscle memory.
Now they were about to enact their small, theatrical charade. Looking through night vision goggles and tailor-made optics, the men quickly took down the first emplacement with ease. The two guards dropped without so much as a whimper, each hit in the head by the nine-millimeter rounds of the submachine guns. Rising up from the vegetation, the six men proceeded carefully into the encampment, holding a watch position by the emplacement while two other men dragged the bodies into the jungle. They were quiet and they were quick and thus they advanced further. A roving patrol was brought down and the bodies stashed underneath one of the stilted buildings of the camp. They'd taken down five of the eighteen on-duty guards in less than two minutes.
Continuing into the camp, the men took down another patrol and another emplacement, all at once, with five expertly placed shots from less than twenty-five meters. Once again, the bodies were hidden and the men moved onward. They were aiming to take down the entire perimeter force before moving on Bray's location. The guard change had happened only thirty minutes ago and that meant they had ninety minutes before anyone would start looking for the current guard shifts. It was more than enough time for them to clear out to the south. With the moon revealing more and more of itself with each passing cloud, the men were careful to stick to the shadows, lest they be silhouetted and spotted. Ten of eighteen meant that they were ahead in the count. They had two more emplaced positions and one more roving patrol to tackle. Carefully, they moved around the corner, cautiously watching each footfall to avoid traps or mines.
Moving further, they approached the next emplaced position, only to find it empty. Looking around with their night vision goggles, they expected a patrol as well but saw nothing. The six men were now beginning to wonder what was happening. The camp was quiet, there was no sign of movement, and yet an enemy force wasn't where it was supposed to be, where they had been time and time again. The men considered an abort but pressed onward, moving onto the next emplaced position. They got halfway there before the entire camp was bathed in illumination from numerous spotlights. Caught in the center of this light tunnel, the six men froze in their tracks.
With one word into his mic, the team leader notified his superiors that they'd been captured, that the mission was a bust, and that they would not be making their extraction. It was the worst code that the mission planners wanted to hear but they had a protocol and with a single word response, they cut the link. Charlie Squad was completely deniable and completely black and, as of the two-word-exchange, no longer in existence. The bright spotlights blinded the men, who removed their night vision goggles but did not release their weapons. They knew that they had weapons pointed at them but no one could see anything.
"Drop your weapons," a voice called out from the silence. The Layartebians held firm. "Drop your weapons," the voice repeated. It was Bray's voice and it boomed over the clearing. By now, the camp was waking up and more men would be grabbing their weapons and coming out to see what was happening. Inadvertently, the men had triggered a motion sensor dug into the ground and linked to the camp's CCTV system. The Layartebians had never stood a chance.
"Yankee," the team leader said as he held up his hands and slid off his backpack, which included the team's radio. He stepped forward a few paces to clear himself away from the radio and held up his MP5 so that he motioned to putting it down. He would have ordered his men to shoot had they been able to see anyone, which would have certainly been suicide but suicide beat imprisonment and torture, which they were sure to endure. As the team leader moved away, another member of the squad casually lowered his weapon and aimed at the radio, though not overtly. With his weapon on automatic, he squeezed and held the trigger until the report of a gunshot cut him down and silenced his weapon but not before he'd emptied the rest of his clip into the radio, destroying it.
The gunshot caused the men to open fire and a quick gun battle ensued. The upper hand went to Bray's men who had the advantage of position and the environment yet two of them were killed in the short melee. The team leader and two other men in the six-man squad were struck and sent to the ground while the other two were outright killed leaving three dead and three wounded. The gunfire stopped and silence filled the camp again until Bray's laughter broke it. "This could have been much easier for you," he said, "now it will be hard."
Monday, June 3rd, 2019 | 11:00 hrs [UTC+12]
Suva, Fiji | Toorak
18° 8' 18" S, 178° 25' 59" E
"Why do you fight for Jimi?" Bray implored through his megaphone. He was fifty-eight now but still the soldier that he once was and on the verge of victory. His army had consisted of three hundred men fifteen years ago and now it had swelled to almost a thousand. The other guerilla groups had agreed to unification with Bray's superior force. Six months ago, he'd launched his offensive against the Fijian government and armed forces and now he was but a mile from the Presidential Palace where President Jimi Ridgeway was holed up with the last remnants of his Presidential Guard. Amidst the fury of street fighting and chaos of a civil war, Layartebian Sea Hawk helicopters flew to and from the embassy, picking up vacationers and nationals who'd taken shelter in the embassy over the past two weeks. Until two weeks ago, the fighting had been in a state of stalemate and the island's resorts were open for business. Then Bray ended the stalemate with a rapid drive to Suva.
Nine days ago, Bray's men had captured the airport, effectively shutting down escape from the island nation. Stranded vacationers fled to the embassy, which had become a refuge for far more people than the embassy had capacity to hold yet Ambassador Louise Hester had done her best to take in everyone that she could, though she gave preference to Layartebian nationals, as was her job. Shortly thereafter, a Layartebian amphibious force had put to sea from Pearl Harbor and raced three thousand nautical miles to Fiji to begin evacuations. Those had begun just after dawn and the Sea Hawks and Super Stallions affecting that evacuation were - in some cases - louder than the gunfire. It was cannon fodder for Bray who commanded his men "from the front" and shouted and taunted the opposition from his bullhorn.
"Look at these helicopters," he'd shout, "the Layartebians have come to take their own. To take Jimi. To take your leaders away and to leave you to die. Put down your arms and join us. We will free this island from the rule of Jimi and his Layartebian masters. Forget not that this is the nation which sent commandos to kill me, who failed! The Empire, the greatest military power, has failed to kill me. What does that say?" He'd then go into a spiel about him being God's spokesman, that he was the Hand of God for Fiji.
Defections in the last nine days had been high but not so high that the Fijian Armed Forces simply evaporated. They continued to fight, hearing horrible tales of what Bray's men did to captives and defectors, some of those tales true and some embellishment. The tale about Bray personally eating the heart of a captain who'd been captured was, unfortunately, not false. It was part of a mythos he'd put out for himself and which he used to drive complete fear into his enemies. "Defect from Jimi and return Fiji to the people," he continued to shout as his men continued to fight.
The Fijian Crisis, as it was being called in the Layartebian media, was a crisis made for television. Reporters on the ground showed the gray, Layartebian helicopters flying to and from the sea, their door guns armed and manned by crew chiefs and gunners who looked ominously down to the ground. Sometimes Bray's men took pot shots at the helicopters but he scolded them severely for this saying, "Let the Layartebians leave in peace for if they are poked, they will strike back." His words were true. The Layartebian government wasn't overly concerned that the island nation of Fiji was about to be taken over by a madman so long as none of its nationals were killed or its helicopters shot down. The evacuation of the embassy was running smoothly and there was little to do now but get people into helicopters in an orderly fashion and fly them out to the warships. The embassy's classified information and sensitive electronics had already been destroyed, which was the biggest protocol to follow and not that Fiji was a hotbed of clandestine activity but the Empire didn't want any of its secrets, no matter how benign, to enter the public realm.
"Defect, defect or face defeat. Defeat is dishonorable. Victory is glorious!" Bray continued to goad over his loudspeaker as his men advanced into Suva. It was only a matter of hours, not even days, before they reached the outskirts of the Presidential Palace, before it was overrun, before Bray declared himself President of Fiji.