Rise of the Liberators (Terrafide Book 1) Read online

  At best, Ray guessed that Kiki’s military training facility flaunted as much square footage and hygiene as an American convenience store. The contents within the weathered walls were maintained by a crew of cooks and custodians who came by boat twice a day from a nearby island to service the site when it was active. Security at the facility was provided by the Liberators themselves, of course, and Ray hoped that the Mama’s Boys, parked among the island’s dense trees and brush, were concealed from curious airplanes and satellites passing overhead. Regardless, ACE kept constant surveillance of the area. Unauthorized flying objects that approached Kiki were detected by the Liberators, and USS George Washington, an offshore aircraft carrier, sent verbal warnings and bogies if necessary to ward off unwanted visitors.

  Most of the training at Kiki took place not on the island, but in the ocean. The Eagle Scouts quickly learned their state-of-the-art machines moved as skillfully and gracefully in water either as free-style swimming sentinels or nuclear-powered submarines. In fact, the greatest challenge posed for Liberators operating in the ocean had little to do with mobility and more to do with targeting. ACE’s dynamic visual processing system was coordinated largely through drones and satellites, an aerial connection that proved less effective when assessing underwater targets. While sonar and other sensing capabilities wired into the Mama’s Boys helped organize attacks, the Eagle Scouts sometimes had to rely on their own judgement and specially-designed torpedoes to successfully seek and destroy the enemy during combat drills. Their submerged targets were deployed by George Washington as anchoring or roaming decoys that varied in size and shape from birthday balloons to commercial-sized blimps.

  Unfortunately, the Marines had little naval training and they sometimes confused sea life and ship wreckage for legitimate targets. Such was the case with Sergeant John Huxley and Specialist David Kim during their first day of exercises conducted in the South Pacific, when the combined wisdom of the two young men led to a coordinated attack against a sunken Spanish galleon located eighty miles offshore from Kiki. The galleon was a prized artifact according to an international historical registry, and its obliteration earned the novice navigators quite a laugh from the crew and quite a reaming from the captain.

  “If that were a mosque you blew up and not some old pirate ship, we’d probably have some considerable explaining to do,” Ray said following the mishap. “Who knows, we still might.”

  Within days of their stay at Kiki, the Eagle Scouts put to rest a second-time World War II-era fighter plane, likely dislodged from the ocean floor and sent adrift due to the sheer volume of explosive activity generated by the Liberators. The list of unintended targets also included modern fishing boats and trade ships, whose fates in their underwater graves likely began after they were overturned by sea storms, only to be resurrected and forced into their ocean crypts once again by the Marines. In addition, sea life was disturbed by the Liberator’s drills, unintended carnage that included streams of bloated fish and mauled dolphins, sharks and porpoises often found floating belly-up on the ocean surface and then contaminating island beaches.

  While Ray’s unit destroyed ninety-nine percent of legitimate targets, the collateral damage the Eagle Scouts caused within a one-hundred-mile radius of Kiki was confirmed by George Washington and analyzed by the Pentagon. Data from the drills was used to develop better methods for submerged Liberator pilots with low visibility and limited computer assistance to identify appropriate enemy targets. Even so, aquatic combat remained a challenge for Ray’s crew. It was also the only reason the captain was glad he and his men were headed to Iran, since most of the fighting was to be conducted on land, where the Eagle Scouts felt confident and capable. In fact, Ray’s favorite part of his day lurking below the ocean’s depths was at the end of it, when his Liberator jettisoned out of the water and transformed midair into a sentinel landing on both feet onshore. For him and his machine, solid ground never felt so good.

  Most of the time at Kiki was spent focused on work, where Ray and his unit were isolated from most other distractions. As a family man, Ray longed for the comforts of home, and he looked forward to returning there as expeditiously as possible. In the meantime, faced with occasional periods of downtime, Ray tried to pursue healthy forms of recreation. He read in a hammock he made from a discarded blanket and rope. He snorkeled from a breathing tube he fashioned from a bamboo reed. While Ray did enjoy taking the periodic trip to imbibe at a tiki bar located at the neighboring island village, he didn’t make a habit of it and he avoided entanglements with the local women altogether, unlike the other men in his squad. Ray was regarded by his squad as an approachable leader who at times exhibited a decent sense of humor, but they respected him more because he kept his distance.

  Ray learned this lesson the hard way after a grueling training session in which the fifteenth and final false target, a mast from a boat, bobbed up to the ocean surface, the white sail waving in the water like nature’s flag of surrender, before it was misidentified by an Eagle Scout and blasted to shreds.

  On that note, Ray called it a day. The Eagle Scouts cleaned up, cooled off and clowned around on the beach as their Liberators stood like giant guardians along the shore and monitored their playful activity.

  Kim broke protocol by splashing the captain in the face and inviting him to join the other men at the tiki bar that evening.

  “Maybe you can help me hook up with one of the older locals,” Kim said to the captain.

  “Will it be a man or woman?” Huxley said, and his remark earned a round of laughter from the squad.

  “What do you think?” Kim said.

  “I think either would be fine for you, as long as you’re ready to lose your virginity,” Huxley said.

  There were more laughs. Kim tackled Huxley, and they wrestled briefly underwater. Finally the two emerged, took a deep breath, and regarded the captain.

  “So, how about it, sir?” Kim said. “Will you join us tonight?”

  “You’re only twenty,” Ray said. “Aren’t you too young to be drinking and carousing with these guys?”

  “You kidding, Captain?” Huxley said. “Wonder Kid has mad game. Come see for yourself.”

  Maybe Huxley had a point, Ray thought. If the Pentagon trusted a young man with a billion-dollar piece of equipment – even after he mistook a Spanish galleon for an enemy torpedo launcher – maybe the specialist could be trusted with a few fruity drinks. Ray decided to find out; it was time for all of his men to relax and let recent disappointments on Kiki wash from their memories, at least for one evening.

  “It’s a deal, then,” Ray said. “First round on me.”

  A round of hoots and whistles came from the Eagle Scouts, and the day’s grueling training session turned into a late-night, grueling drinking session. Ray’s men swam their Liberators south and beached them on the opposite side of the neighboring island village. From there they walked along the shore until they arrived at the beachside bar, prominent with the locals.

  They had a rip-roaring time, gathered around lit torches well into the night, sipping spiked punch, listening to American pop music over a radio. A woman sat between Huxley and Kim and they competed for her attention, whispering sweet nothings to her in the firelight. Only Mustafa was absent from the revelry, since he abstained from alcohol.

  All went well until well after the Eagle Scouts’ bedtime.

  “Haven’t we had enough?” Kim said as the bartender arrived with another tray of Mai Tais. “I suspect we’ve drunk as many cocktails tonight as there are dead fish in the ocean …”

  “And all at our expense,” Huxley said. “How about that?”

  The sergeant raised his glass in a toast. The other men sat somberly, regarding him.

  But not the captain. An inexplicable feeling of disgust came over the commander, and he suddenly found himself standing over his men, his Beretta drawn from his holster, taking turns pointing it at Huxley and Kim. Their date disappeared like a ghost in the shadows as
the captain gazed down the barrel of his gun and the crosshairs shifted back and forth between two faces.

  “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe …” he said.

  The expression on Huxley and Kim quickly switched from amused to confused to frightened. It was an expression the captain knew well in his many years of service, an expression he knew he would see again soon on his young, tough but very human Marines as they forged ahead in combat. It was an expression the captain thought was likely to haunt him forever.

  That startled look from his men was also the last thing Ray remembered as he woke onshore of Kiki at the foot of his beached Liberator the following morning. His clothes were torn and drenched, and he felt as if he had been in a fistfight with himself and lost, his head a pulverized mess.

  Ray slowly washed the sand off his body and then he stumbled up the winding path to the outpost and joined the rest of his squad in the cafeteria for breakfast. None of the Eagle Scouts looked as bad as the captain and they were quiet as their commander took a seat next to them.

  “I want to apologize for the way I behaved towards the end of last night,” Ray said to Kim, Huxley and the rest of the unit. “I was out of line, and I embarrassed myself. More importantly, I embarrassed the squad.”

  Ray surveyed the eyes of his crew, waiting for a response.

  “No problem, Captain,” Huxley said. “Dave and I get it. The two of us need work as pilots, but at least we can hold our liquor!”

  Kim laughed, followed by the others, and the issue seemed resolved. From that point onward, however, Ray resigned to only drink with his men on special occasions, perhaps a small toast when they returned home, mission complete.

  However, since drinking was a preferred pastime of the Eagle Scouts, Ray endured his moral hangover quietly and stoically through self-imposed exile. During his downtime, Ray found new hobbies to occupy himself without the company of his men and their beverages. He made a surfboard from a felled tree and he hiked the jungle hills of Kiki with a walking stick whittled from a broken branch. Ray was sometimes joined during these solitary excursions by Mustafa, a fellow conscientious objector to alcohol and its sometimes socially-damning results.

  Ray also continued to read from his hammock. While he liked to follow the news, his alma mater’s sports teams and the latest advances in science and technology, his interest always seemed to return to the enemy. In college, Ray took a course on the history of Islam to fulfill a multicultural education requirement and at that time he was amazed to discover the scope of that religious civilization’s many manifestations from its inception and expansion under the prophet Mohammed, to the mighty caliphates and sultanates that spawned in the millennium that followed, and to their decline and demise and the eventual rise of terrorism along with the continued sectarian strife between rival religious groups of the modern era in the wake of such changes.

  For a religion that offered humanity so much culture and insight, the hate of its zealots was destined to become Islam’s biggest disappointment to its followers and a world which might otherwise tolerate and value the more benign side of its message, Ray thought. Dividing the people of the Earth into two groups, one of the faithful worthy of sparing, and the rest infidels who were not, was anything but God’s will, and unfortunately this extremist tendency was only likely to win the religion more enemies over time, at least to Ray’s mind. Truth transcended more than any one book, and denial of that fact denied the broader reality of existence. God was either everywhere or nowhere but a subject over which no one had a monopoly regardless.

  In their faulty thinking, radical Islamists, like all extremists, were destined to fall on the wrong side of history. To Ray, their appeal to violence as a method of forging the world in their image seemed as valid, likely and absurd as his own fantasies about benevolent alien creatures coming to Earth and providing Americans with Liberators to sweep such vermin off the planet. None of it really made sense.

  Such nonsense was perpetuated not in the name of protecting God or country or this corner of the universe, but simply as its own unique brand of nihilism. People over the long run were motivated by benefit, not fear, and it benefitted humanity more over time to work through its problems than to kill each other over them.

  As such, Ray thought, the extremists or aliens or whoever else perpetuated violence as a means to an end deserved the fate they had coming. As for his part, the captain of the Liberators believed he had few delusions about his role in the upcoming saga, only faith that calm minds, pragmatism, and mercy prevailed in making a better world for his daughter. To this end, Ray felt he was the right man to be training the sights on some of his species’ most thoughtless, terrible, trigger-happy assholes.

  After all, Ray wasn’t sure how much he believed in God, at least one that might come to his or anyone else’s rescue. For better or worse, people needed to take responsibility for the paradise or hell which they created on Earth. God had nothing to do with it. The Almighty was not the reason for the world’s cruelties and injustices, but as the extremists proved, just another excuse to further them, Ray thought.

  Over the course of Ray’s readings, however, one development related to the rise of Islam in which he remained greatly impressed concerned the Sufis, spiritual mystics whose legendary origins seemed to have stemmed alongside the first flowering Islamic empire of the eighth century. The Sufis were said to be Islam’s original warriors and proselytizers who later became guardians of the faith and peaceful wisdom bearers to rulers. Eventually, their call for tolerance and understanding in dealing with others earned the ire of extremists who decried Sufis as heretics and made them targets alongside other free thinkers over time.

  Still, for nearly a thousand years Sufism as a philosophy, discipline and tradition flourished. With its focus on purifying one’s heart, it often has been described as the apple on the tree of Islam, the religion’s greatest gift to humanity. Apparently Sufism silently persisted within and beyond the Islamic world into Ray’s lifetime, although its adherents were not always embraced for their loving message. Extremists such as the Taliban, who believed they represented the true Islamic orthodoxy, considered Sufism a threat to their establishment. They destroyed Sufi shrines and killed practitioners when they had the opportunity. Little research was required by Ray to discover these grim facts. In 2022, the atrocities Taliban insurgents committed against Sufis in contested areas of Pakistan alone often made headlines on the Telenet.

  Despite Sufism’s silence in a world dominated by violence, Ray was fascinated by the tradition’s epic history, a legacy which likely fueled its hate-mongers’ rage even more. While lying between palm trees, the leader of the Eagle Scouts pleasantly explored the richness of Islamic mysticism. He listened to audiobooks and podcasts ACE transmitted to his helmet, and he absorbed the many messages and excerpts pertaining to the martyrdom of al-Hallaj, the poetry of Rumi, the tales of the Mullah Nasruddin and the meditations of Hazrat Inayat Khan, all of whom were great Sufis. In the course of these reflections, Ray paid particular attention to stories that contained elements of guerilla warfare, trickery or deceit. The captain took notes and corroborated the findings of his research with Mustafa, who grudgingly confirmed that Sufis were adept at understanding and playing on the subtle notions of illusion and reality.

  Because major facets of Sufism developed alongside Iran’s rise and fall as the heart of the Persian Empire, Ray strived to develop a list of insights and battle strategies that might help the Eagle Scouts understand and undermine their enemy.

  Mustafa wasn’t fooled, however, and he interpreted the captain’s probe into Islamic mysticism as one big, bizarre and bumbling attempt to seem culturally competent in the eyes of his subordinate.

  “I applaud you for rising above the ignorance of your American background, Captain, but in this case, ignorance is warranted,” Mustafa said. “It’s greatly tragic and useless to ponder the intricacies of a civilization whose decimation you have neither the will nor means to prevent.”


  The captain’s efforts to embrace the enemy’s follies as well as virtues were endearing, perhaps, but in Mustafa’s opinion they were largely misguided, and he continued to disagree with the captain on this point over the course of their many hikes and discussions together.

  Sufism was a way of looking at the world, true, but it was only practiced by a small minority of people in modern Iran, and besides, it didn’t offer direct advice on how to subjugate enemies, at least not anything the Eagle Scouts could take to the battlefield, Mustafa argued. Any vestiges of Sufism in the Middle East or anywhere else, no matter how worthy, had little to do with the problems of modern Iran, whose regime was only a little less backward and oppressive, say, than one the Taliban might put in place if given the chance, Mustafa argued.

  Despite the lieutenant’s contentions, the captain persisted with his studies. During their last night on Kiki, as Ray and Mustafa sat and watched the sun set from the white sandy shore, the Muslim finally called out his commander for what he perceived to be his self-righteous silliness.

  “You’ve been acting like you’re an ambassador of goodwill, when in fact you’re a conqueror of ill will who will soon kick a country to the ground that is already pathetic and weak,” the lieutenant said. “The men in our unit don’t care about the pleasantries of a people or the history of a culture they’re about to annihilate, and why should they? It’s better and easier for them to stick their heads in the sand than it is to mourn or celebrate a society they’re about to destroy.”

  “So, you don’t think there is anything we might learn of the enemy that could help us overtake them quickly and minimize loss of life?” Ray said.