Jungle Breakout: WarKeep 2030: WarKeep 2030, #2

By Michael Kasner and Pedro Veloso

From action/adventure novelist Michael Kasner comes a series of future military warfare! The year is 2030 and the world is in a state of political and territorial unrest. The Peacekeepers, an elite military force is created to combat it. Armed with all the tactical advantages of modern technology, battle hard and ready when the free world is threatened - the Peacekeepers are the baddest grunts on the planet.

JUNGLE BREAKOUT: WARKEEP 2030 - Book 2: Echo Company's transport plane crash-lands in Laos under fire from a renegade Han jet fighter. With only their Light Assault Rifles functioning, they head for the border...and encounter an astounding sight: a village of descendants of American POWs from the Vietnam War. With the enemy biting at their heels, Echo Company and sixty refugees are thrust into jungle guerrilla warfare at its most relentless and primitive. But they're Peacekeepers - strip them down and put a rock in their hands, and they're still bad news.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Caliber Books
• Release date: Dec 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215014578

Book preview

Chapter One

Over Southern Laos

October 8, 2030 A.D.

A lone United States Expeditionary Force C-36B Valkyrie supersonic assault transport flew through the early-morning sky over southern Laos. It was the winter monsoon season, and though the high-flying Valkyrie cut through a crystal blue sky, an unbroken sea of clouds shrouded the mountainous jungles below. Even at forty thousand feet above the Laotian mountains, the Valkyrie’s pilot routinely glanced over to the terrain-following radar map to check her progress. Their next stop was Tokyo for refueling before the long hop across the Pacific.

A blip on her air-warning-radar monitor caught the pilot’s eye. What the hell…what’s he doing here? she muttered. This is supposed to be a clear flight corridor.

Who? the copilot asked, his self-heating coffee cup paused halfway up to his lips.

We’ve got us a ‘Bandit’ approaching fast, the pilot replied. The readout says he’s a Han Shenyang J-19 Flasher, and he’s a long way from home. We’re at least two hundred and fifty klicks from their border.

The copilot turned in his seat to see if he could spot the fighter. Where’s he at?

Coming in on our four o’clock.

The copilot looked over his right shoulder back toward the Valkyrie’s highly swept wings. At supersonic cruise, the swing wings were pulled almost all the way back to reduce drag and optimize fuel consumption for the long flight.

Break left! he suddenly shouted. He’s on a collision course!

The pilot shoved the control wheel forward and stomped down on the left rudder pedal at the same time. The Valkyrie banked sharply to the left and pointed its nose at the ground below.

The speeding Han fighter passed a few meters in front of the Valkyrie, rocking the ship with the wake of its twin jet exhausts.

Jesus! The copilot instinctively ducked. That fucker almost hit us!

Bringing the ship back to level flight, the pilot switched her UHF radio over to Guard, the international aircraft emergency radio channel.

Han J-19 fighter, she transmitted in English, the international language of fighter pilots. This is USEF Peacekeeper flight Zulu Three Bravo. We are on a UN- authorized flight plan. Please keep your distance. Over.

No return message came from the Han pilot. Instead, he wheeled his fighter around in the clear blue sky and, once it was back behind the Valkyrie, aimed its needle nose at them again.

Jesus Christ! the copilot screamed. He’s painting us with his target-acquisition radar! He’s going to shoot!

The pilot advanced the throttles to her four jet engines to full military power, pulled the swing wings back to their maximum sweep and went into a shallow dive. The unarmed Valkyrie leaped forward, quickly reaching its maximum speed of Mach 2.2, or eighteen hundred miles per hour. Even at that speed, she could not outrun the Han Flasher, but at least she could try to make it a little more difficult for him to shoot them down.

The copilot keyed his throat mike. Mayday! Mayday! he radioed. This is USEF flight Zulu Three Bravo. We are under attack by a Han Flasher fighter. He glanced at the nav readout. Our position is Gulf Lima three-six-niner-two-seven-three. Mayday! Mayday!

THE WORLD of the year 2030 was somewhat more peaceful than it had been over the past forty years, but what peace there was had been imposed by the battlefield, not the conference table.

During the great disarmament of the late 1990s, the United Nations had tried to control the runaway sped of nuclear-weapons technology, but they failed. They failed because they had relied on the belief that men and governments would do the right thing if they were only shown the way. They had called upon nations to disarm themselves in the name of peace, brotherhood and civilization, but not everyone answered the idealistic call.

Then came the first use of nuclear weapons since the end of World War II, the short Arab-Israeli nuclear exchange of 2004.

The great powers had reacted to this instantly. Led by the United States and the Russians, military strike forces had gone into the Middle East and forcefully removed all the remaining nuclear weapons from the warring factions. Further ground combat erupted during the operation, but no more nukes had been detonated.

When the Middle Eastern operation was over, the major powers had eliminated the nuclear stockpile of the rest of the world, as well. Following that, they’d destroyed the remainder of their own nuclear arsenals except for a few weapons held for use against anyone who decided to start the nuclear arms race again.

Since the UN could not be relied on to prevent the re-proliferation of the banned weapons, a completely new force was needed to undertake this heavy responsibility—a force that could be counted on to do whatever was necessary to prevent the resurrection of the nuclear nightmare. The politicians had clearly failed, and it was time to give the professional soldiers a chance.

In the year 2006 a joint declaration of the Russian and American governments announced that they would form a new military peacekeeping force, the Russian and United States Expeditionary Forces, or the Peacekeepers. Drawn from the elite military units of both nations, these troops were the elite of the elite. Not only were they the best fighting men and women on the face of the planet, but they were also equipped with the best weapons and military hardware that twenty-first-century technology could produce.

When the situation got so bad that the Peacekeepers had to be called in, they didn’t waste time talking. There would be no under-the-table political maneuvering and deal making when they were deployed. When the battle was over, the smoke cleared, and the bodies were counted, the Peacekeepers didn’t negotiate peace; they imposed it by force of arms.

This time the United States Expeditionary Force had drawn the line against aggression in the Asian high-mountain kingdom of Nepal. The death in 2029 of Emperor Lin I, the founder of the Chinese Han Empire, had thrown the entire region into turmoil. In the bloody struggle for the succession to the Jade Throne of Beijing, several Chinese warlords had broken away from the troubled empire to form independent states. Jing Po, the warlord of Anam, the southwestern-most region of the empire, was the most aggressive of these rebel leaders.

To expand his territories, he’d undertaken to destabilize his neighboring Southeast Asian nations by sponsoring internal strife and then sending military volunteers to put down the resulting insurrections. When that tactic hadn’t worked in Nepal, he’d simply invaded the small mountainous nation. The United States Expeditionary Force, the Peacekeepers, had instantly responded to protect Nepal.

Fighting alongside the native Gurkha troops, the Peacekeepers had repelled the incursion into eastern Nepal. It had been a short fight, but costly for the Han as they threw their massed troops against the overwhelming firepower of the Peacekeepers and their Gurkha allies. Even though the Han troops were well equipped with modern high-tech weapons and equipment, their age-old tactics of attempting to overwhelm their enemies with the sheer weight of their numbers hadn’t changed. It had been a bloodbath for the Han, and they had quickly withdrawn behind their borders.

In a rare demonstration of effectiveness, the United Nations had stepped in at that point and secured an armistice. Although the Peacekeepers knew full well that the UN effort would most likely fail and they would have to return to protect Nepal again, they were on their way home now, another job well done.

Apparently, though, the Han air force had not been informed about the UN ceasefire.

THE VALKYRIE’S PILOT was good, but there was only so much she could do against a state-of-the-art missile-armed jet interceptor. Unlike the dirt-hugging Tilt Wing assault transports, the high-flying Valkyrie was not equipped with decoy-flare dispensers, IR shields on its jet exhausts, radar jammers or any of the other missile countermeasure defenses of modern tactical aircraft. Its mission profile never took it into the line of fire, so its designers thought that the countermeasures would not be needed. So much for thinking.

Without these countermeasures, the only option left to the pilot was to take evasive action. But, although the Valkyrie was as fast as many jet fighters, it was a large aircraft and it had not been built for dogfighting. It did, however, have variable-geometry wings and small movable canards set well forward on the nose. Combined with a quick hand on the throttles and full- span flaparons, those features made it more agile than its size alone would indicate.

With her hands flying over the flight controls and her fingers punching the keys on the flight computer, the pilot started into a slow, diving bank to the right. As soon as the plane was committed to the turn, she chopped her throttles, slammed the canards to the full Up position and kicked down on the left rudder pedal as she snapped the aileron-control wheel sharply to the left.

The Valkyrie’s nose came up abruptly as it snap-rolled to the left, the computer-controlled wings slamming forward as the flaps deployed. Pushing the throttles past the stops to full-military-power position, the pilot pulled the wings all the way back as the ship went into a sharply banked turn. Suddenly the Valkyrie was no longer where it had been in the sky, but was heading in the opposite direction.

While the pilot tried to evade the fighter’s radar lock-on, the copilot stayed on the radio transmitting his Mayday call. There was no one in the vicinity who could help them, but if anyone recorded the call, it might help the rescue effort after they were shot down. The pilot’s monitor showed the Han missile when it fell clear of the J-19’s underwing pylon and its motor ignited. He’s got lock-on, she said calmly. And he’s firing.

Oh, shit!

The two aircrew watched in fatal fascination as the missile streaked directly for them. A few seconds later the missile detonated several hundred meters short of the Valkyrie. A brilliant flash of light filled the cockpit, blinding them before their helmet visors could polarize to blank out the glare.

When her visor cleared, the pilot was stunned to find that she was still alive. He missed us!

But he sure as hell did something to us, the copilot said. Look at the instrument panel.

Every instrument and gauge, on the panel was dead. Worse than that, the high-pitched whine of the turbines could no longer be heard. The only sound in the cockpit was the faint hiss of the air over the aircraft’s skin. At his station behind the pilot, the flight engineer frantically flipped circuit breakers and reset switches in a vain attempt to restore power to the aircraft and restart the engines.

All the power’s gone! he yelled up to the pilot. Everything’s dead!

When the Valkyrie’s flight computer went out, it took the wing-sweep controls with it. The ship’s reserve hydraulic system tried to move the wings back up to the default, un-swept position. But the system didn’t work as engineered, and the wings didn’t move all the way forward; they were stuck in the transonic position. To compound the problem, one of the wings was a fraction of a degree less swept back than the other, causing an asymmetrical airflow that forced the plane into a slow right-hand spiraling turn. No longer graceful, the stricken Valkyrie fell out of the sky.

In the cockpit the pilot and copilot pitted their full strength against dead controls and the buffeting of aerodynamic forces gone crazy. Bracing their feet on the instrument panel and pulling back as hard as they could on the frozen controls, they were able to pull the nose up slowly. But the uneven wing sweep still had the plane caught in a tightening right-hand spiral.

Since the trim tabs had no hydraulic backup, they had to stand on the left rudder pedals to bring the ship out of the turn. By the time they finally had the plane under control, the Valkyrie had dropped below the cloud cover and was losing altitude fast.

The pilot frantically searched the unbroken sea of green below for a flat place to attempt a crash landing. Sound the crash alarm, she yelled to the copilot. We’re going in!

It’s dead, too! the copilot yelled back.

By now the Valkyrie was coming down fast. With its wings swept halfway back, the ship was also falling nose down. At the last possible moment the pilot exerted superhuman strength and pulled back as hard as she could on the frozen controls. The Valkyrie’s nose came up enough that it didn’t plow directly into the trees, but hit their tops a glancing blow.

The ship’s underwing jet engines were designed to break away in case of a crash and, for once, the design worked. The Valkyrie bounced back up into the air. The second time it hit, the wings slashed through the treetops before shearing off close to the wing roots. Unencumbered now, the sleek fuselage plunged into the trees like an arrow returning to earth. Right as the nose was a few meters from the jungle floor, the tail surfaces ripped free, taking the tail cone with them. That dropped the rear of the fuselage enough to keep the plane from slamming into the ground nose first. Instead, the fuselage slid along the ground before a massive tree finally brought it to an abrupt halt.

For a moment the jungle was silent. Then slowly the sounds of its inhabitants returned.

Chapter Two

Southern Laos

October 8

The first figure to stumble out of the twisted fuselage of the shattered Valkyrie was a big, burly man with faded blue eyes and a shaved head. He was wearing a Peacekeeper chameleon camouflage uniform and had a 5mm M-25 light assault rifle in his hand. Once clear of the wreckage, he stopped and took stock of his surroundings.

Echo Company First Sergeant Roger Big Daddy Ward had been in the Army for most of his adult life, and his broad face bore the scars and wrinkles of over twenty-six years as a combat infantryman. The puckered scar running along the right side of his jaw had been given to him by a Pakistani bayonet. The matching scar on the left side of his face was made by a grenade frag he had picked up in the jungles of Colombia. The deep wrinkles around his eyes were from squinting into the sun of more than a dozen battlefields ranging from Egypt to the Amazonian jungle. No one would ever mistake Big Daddy Ward for anything other than what he was, a professional soldier. But, despite everything that had happened to him in his career, this was a first.

Ward had been asleep in the back of the Valkyrie when the Han fighter made its attack run. He had awakened when the pilot sent the ship into evasive maneuvers, and he had tightened his seat belt. Then came the intense flash of light and the plane plummeting from the sky. The resulting crash hadn’t taken him by surprise, but his surviving it had.

The wreckage had come to rest in a densely wooded jungle ravine. From the path it had cut through the trees, Ward saw that the gods of war had smiled on him again. Almost miraculously the aircraft had managed to miss all the large trees on its way down until it came to its final halt. The nose section was crushed, but though the fuselage was split in several places, it was more or less intact. Looking up, he saw that the trees had closed back over the wreckage, all but hiding it from above.

Hearing a noise behind him, he turned back and helped another man from the wreckage, Major Alexander Rosemont, the commander of Echo Company, United States Expeditionary Force. When the USEF had pulled out of Nepal, Rosemont,Ward and a small detachment from Echo Company had remained behind to oversee the shutdown of their temporary base in the Himalayas. That job completed, they had been on their way back to their home base at Fort Benning, Georgia, when the Han fighter had intercepted them.

Rosemont was blond and blue eyed like his namesake Alexander the Great, but that was where the similarity ended. The legendary Macedonian king had a small, wiry man, and Rosemont was tall and muscular. At slightly over six feet tall, and solidly built, in the age of Alexander, Rosemont would have been a giant.

Where do you think we are,Top? he asked Ward.

The first sergeant shook his head. "I don’t know exactly where we are, sir. But