100 Miles East of the Town of Akkan

Taqat Plain, Hillah, Al-Adhara

2200 Local, February 12, 2481

Flugmeister Makoto Yamamoto stood on the thin cushion of the commander's seat, poking her upper body through the roof hatch of the Rattler. The Rattler was a small mobile command truck designed for heavy off-road use far from support facilities. The Republic Air Force only fielded a small number of the pickup-like trucks, most of which belonged to special operations units such as the one Makoto was assigned to.

These particular trucks were modified specifically for the type of missions Makoto was now leading her airmen into. The modifications included replacing the normal flat paint with a special electromagnetic absorbent skin, ensuring the windows were non-reflective, and baffling the exhaust to reduce heat signatures given off by the engine. Her unit had even gone so far as to issue each of her airman body armor with stealthy properties similar to those of the trucks.

“Things look clear this direction,” Kommandant Rabbie Wilson said dropping his binoculars into the cab.

“This way too. We better get moving as soon as the other two get back from the bushes.”

Rabbie flipped his facemask down and locked it then turned to look for the other two airmen who had went to relieve themselves. The facemask’s night-vision tinted the surroundings in varying shades of green and black. Clumps of brush, mostly bushes two to three feet high, sparsely dotted the otherwise barren desert plain. The plain itself sloped ever so gently down to a large river basin about thirty miles east of where the group had landed the night before. To the west lay a range of large hills, just under the size needed to be considered mountains. They could very well have been mountains at one time, long before erosion took a heavy toll on them. That would explain the gentle slope from the base of the hills down to the river basin.

“C’mon you two, let’s move it. We’ve got places to be and trouble to cause,” Rabbie raised his voice a bit as he roused the two to hurry back to the trucks.

Once the two had settled into the rear seats of Makoto’s Rattler, Rabbie slapped the palm of his hand down onto the roof of his own truck, “Ok boss, it’s all yours!” Both he and Makoto popped back down into the seats of their trucks, pulling the roof hatches closed as they sat. Makoto tapped the dash in front of her as a signal for Nsonowa to get the group moving on its way.

The previous night, Makoto and her element were dropped onto Hillah from the back of some local merchant’s dropcraft. Before striking a deal on the transport of her element and the two Rattlers, she was given an intel tip that he would be more than happy to smuggle them into the Khaytif Emirates, directly to Hallah’s Taqat Plain. The smuggling deal was made in a shady space terminal orbiting the backwater planet Nemesis. Every precaution was taken to ensure the merchant wasn’t tipped off to the group’s real identities and reason for needing to be smuggled onto Hillah. They had stored their body armor and other personal equipment in the Rattlers, then crated the two trucks on pallets. The only personal questions the merchant asked before the deal were why her group wanted to be smuggled onto Hillah, and what the cargo was. She had told him the group was taking revenge on a person in a small town two hundred miles east of Akkan for having her husband killed. As for the cargo, she said it was just two DesertMaster pickups they would use to drive to the town.

The deal cost several million, half paid up-front and half just before the group was dropped from the merchant’s craft. Makoto’s unit was paying for the drop, using one of the accounts set up for her years before. The Air Force would divide her pay amongst the accounts and deposit it using front corporations. She made sure to use each account at least once for personal spending whenever she traveled outside the Republic. Once an account had been used for an operation it was closed along with the identity associated with it, and then a new account was opened.

Getting the money to the merchant was a pretty standard method used both for legitimate and illegitimate purposes around the galaxy, the Universal Funds Transfer System. The system used a set of at least two cards, a single reservation card and one or more transfer cards. She first gave him the reservation card he could use to verify the availability of funds in her account and reserve the specified amount for transfer to his own account. When her group was on-board his dropcraft and underway to Hillah, she gave him a transfer card he could use to perform a transfer of funds, in this case half the total. Finally, just before she dropped from his craft she handed the second transfer card to his loadmaster. When he used that card, the remaining funds were transferred and the transaction was complete.

The funds the merchant reserved in Mikoto's account using the reservation card would remain locked to the three-card set until he used one or both transfer cards, canceled the transaction using the reservation card, or six months passed without the transaction being completed. The system was reliable even for under the table deals. Security for Makoto was provided because reservation and transfer cards had to be activated by her typing a code on the card’s tiny touchscreen, before they could be used by the payee. The merchant's security was provided for because if Makato didn’t pay, her money would be locked for six months or more if he swiped the reservation card at a bank terminal. Another security was provided to him because once funds were reserved, the reservation card prompted him for an access code and would only work with the new code.

Makoto reviewed the mission details and diagrams once more while the Rattlers bounced over the plain at almost 70MPH. Despite the high speed, the ride inside the trucks was relatively smooth. The trucks had suspension travel of almost three feet and large tires, easily taking the one to three foot variations in the terrain as they sped along.

The first objective her element needed to complete was to infiltrate the target area and buildings without being detected. Even though the buildings they were targeting were important to Hillah’s security, intel reports said they weren’t defended much, if at all. Makoto's team had one month to complete all the mission objectives, and if the intel report was correct, they’d be done much sooner than that.

- - -

Makoto and Rabbie observed the distant and brightly lit radar post from their trucks atop a nearby hill. It had taken them a little over an hour to drive over the Taqat Plain and into the Taqat Hills. The post was situated on a flat-topped hill to the north of where they were observing it from. A high fence surrounded a gravel covered courtyard-like area and several buildings. Cameras were strategically placed atop a number of the fence posts and buildings. The entire area was well lit which would make it almost impossible to sneak through the fence. The sound of gravel under foot would certainly set off any sound-activated alarms, as would jet-packs. Makoto’s element needed to infiltrate the large ten story tall structure with sloping sides sitting directly in the center of the compound. Even though the area seemed to have a fair amount of surveillance equipment, not a single person could be seen in within.

“Well whaddya think Rabbie,” Makoto asked.

“Hmmm. Tap drones for the cameras, noise shouldn’t be a problem.”

Makoto kept observing the compound, “Rayen do a RF sweep and confirm frequencies for drones. Halldor and Alexandria, get tap drones on the five cameras surrounding the back end once Rayen confirms frequency availability.”

Tap drones were small marker-sized machines used to tap into a communications wire and inject the desired signals into it. The type of communication going through the wire wasn’t very important, it could be analog, digital, video, audio, or just about anything else. Makoto instructed Rayen to confirm frequencies because control channels for drones were easy to spot once someone was tipped off to them by interference with communications. Rayen would have been watching what was going on with the radio spectrum most of the time the group was on-planet.

“Spectrum is good for drones,” Rayen said after looking at her electronic warfare displays. Covert electronic warfare was what Makoto’s unit, the 1929th Special Electronic Tactics Squadron, was all about. The unit’s symbol was a blue gremlin with a mischievous grin, holding a lightning bolt in one hand and a pair of dikes in the other. Everyone in the unit from the lowest ranking airman to the squadron’s commander, had extensive training in electronics, radio theory, computers, and programming among a long list of other things.

Halldor and Alexandria had both gotten out of the trucks and readied several tap drones after Makoto instructed them on what she wanted done. Alexandria held a drone with her outstretched arm and released it, shortly followed by Halldor with another drone. The two machines hung vertically in the air barely making a noise as their tiny engines held them aloft.

Alexandria put both her hands on the remote control she had been holding in her right hand when she released the drone. An image was sent from the machine’s camera to the display inside her facemask so she could fly the drone as if she was piloting it. Alexandria pushed the remote’s throttle stick up and the drone lifted higher into the sky while she adjusted its attitude so it moved towards the radar post. Less than two minutes later, she had the drone hovering over the highest camera in the compound. Pulling the throttle stick down slightly, she guided the drone down behind the short pole the camera was mounted on and aligned it with the cable running down the pole. She tapped the attitude stick up and pressed a button with her index finger to open the drone’s two grapples. Once the drone had drifted close enough to the cable she pressed the button again to close the grapples around the cable. Alexandria cut power to the drone’s engine and pressed the link button on the control. The drone’s status in her facemask display changed to a red “Examining”, orange “Listening”, yellow “Acquiring”, and finally green “Link” as the machine successfully tapped into the camera. Halldor shortly followed with the second drone several seconds later, and within 15 minutes all five cameras were tapped.

Alexandria looked over to Rabbie, “Ok the cameras are taken care of, all five have good links.”

With the drones attached, Makoto’s element could now sneak through the back end of the compound and into the target building. Each drone intercepted the video feed of the camera it was attached to, processed and removed any sign of element members from it, then injected the sanitized feed back into the cable.

The group rode in the two Rattlers from the top of the hill, down through a small field, and back up another hill to within a few hundred yards of the compound. It had been an uneventful walk from the trucks to the fence, over it, and into the compound. Not a single person was seen walking outside the buildings the entire time the group was infiltrating the site, leading Makoto to believe the intel reports were pretty accurate this time. Like the Rattlers, the element’s body armor was specifically designed to blend in as much as possible with this area of the continent both day and night. The armor also concealed body heat well enough to avoid detection by most infrared sensors. Using equipment similar this, Makoto’s element had successfully completed many radar neutralization missions in the past. However, this was the first ground-based radar in a long time the element acted against; usually they were neutralizing space-based radars.

Only Rabbie, Asaf Goldhirsch, and Konani Knutsen snuck into the compound from the trucks; the other five stayed back keeping an eye out for movement around the area or indications they had been detected. So far everything was going well, the only tasks remaining were to get inside the tall building housing the radar, swap out several interface units, and get out of the compound.

Diesel generators could be heard churning out power for the facility inside the post’s generator house, and only helped to conceal the group’s occasional sound. Rabbie tried the door handle with no luck and motioned with his hand for Asaf to open the door to the radar building; the element wouldn’t be using radio communication unless absolutely necessary. Asaf moved forward, pulling out his lock pick kit from his armor’s left thigh pocket, and began to pick the lock. Even though electronic door locks had been around for hundreds of years, they were rarely used in very remote, supposedly well-guarded, places like this radar post. Even if the lock was an electronic variety, Asaf could have cracked it within several minutes at the most.

Asaf moved back, stored his kit, and regained control of his rifle with both hands upon successfully picking the door’s lock. Rabbie motioned Konani to open the door so Asaf could lead point into the building. Konani slowly turned the door’s handle and gave it a gentle push, making sure to keep to the side of the doorway and create as little noise as possible. The door creaked back on its hinges, slowly coming to a stop almost fully open. Asaf quickly moved in to secure the unlit first floor of the building, followed by Rabbie and Konani.

The building’s dark interior was nothing more than a network of beams holding up the corrugated metal outer walls and three phased array radar units. Konani closed the door once the interior was secured and Rabbie moved up the metal grate steps to the small equipment room. The group didn’t bother turning on the lights, between the various imaging systems in their facemasks they could see just fine.

The three worked quickly to swap out a total of nine shoebox sized interface controllers without disturbing the radar’s operations. The controllers they swapped into the system were not unlike the tap drones. They modified radar data so any spacecraft could be removed from radar sweeps if so desired, and passed that data down to the rest of the system. In less than half an hour all nine controllers were swapped out and functioning correctly. The three packed up the original boxes and moved down to make their egress from the building and compound.

Rabbie placed his pack and the packs of Asaf and Konani into the back of his Rattler upon reaching the trucks. He and the other two took their seats in the Rattlers and the entire element was off to their next objective: fuel. After that, they would need to neutralize nine more radar sites spread across Hillah.