Skeleton Wars Page 6

  When time to leave had come, the underground facility was opened for the first time since its construction. The triangular aircraft rose out of the facility, one at ago, and soared into the skies. They started performing aerobatic shows in the air which attracted the attention of the ordinary ghosts who had been quarantined in their residential areas. The warriors also marched out of the underground facility and paraded in the Ruthst square. They went on chanting different slogans which were praising Lord Ghost, his deputy Roth and their commander Gen. Cov.

  Immediately, the warriors of the second and third divisions started boarding their respective aircraft. Those of the first division remained in the Ruthst Square waiting for Lord Ghost to tell them what to do. Lord Ghost climbed to the platform and stood in front of them. All of them kept quiet and looked at him as he performed his charms. He raised his one arm and pointed at the skies. All of a sudden, a black cloud appeared on the sky directly above the area where these skeleton warriors were standing. The cloud started extending downwards until when it covered all the warriors.

  The area where the warriors were standing was covered by total darkness and the planet started shaking. At first, the tremors were very faint, but they kept on intensifying up to an extent that caused some weak structures in the residential areas of the ordinary ghosts to collapse. A strong flash of lightning which was accompanied by a very violent thunder struck into the dark cloud and by the time it disappeared, all the skeleton warriors had vanished mysteriously.

  At 15:00 hours GMT, it was night time in all US States, when a strong thunderstorm developed throughout the whole country. Surprisingly, the lightning and the loud sound of the preceding thunder could only be seen and heard by those in USA but not in the neighboring countries, Canada and Mexico. When the thunderstorm ceased, the sky was seen splitting apart. In only ten seconds the split elongated and cut across the skies. Out of the split came out a large bolide which traveled towards the ground at a speed of 25Km/h. At an apparent magnitude of -15, this mysterious fireball was brighter than a full moon and could be seen from everywhere in the contiguous USA.

  This burning meteor was extremely bright and the light from it was mistaken by many as daylight which had broken out in the middle of the night. Many of those that were asleep were awoken by the light. They rushed to the windows and joined the others who were gazing at the specter of the bolide. Those who were found walking were stricken with panic and took to different street corners to hide. When the fireball touched the ground, it exploded like fireworks and gave out yellow beams of light and clouds of fire. These clouds of fire raced to the buildings but they did not set any house ablaze. In fact, temperatures remained unchanged everywhere. In spite of the fact that every citizen in the contiguous USA had managed to see the bolide with their eyes, satellites and telescopes at all US observatory centers still failed to track it completely.

  There was total silence all over the country for the five minutes that followed. The silence was only interrupted by tremors which quickly developed in all major US cities and towns. The shaking of the ground lasted for over thirty minutes. It was initially weak but intensified with time and turned into a real earthquake of magnitude of 2.5 on the Richter scale. There was however no major structural damage that occurred except for the windows of some buildings that shattered in some areas. The earthquake was replaced with weak windstorms which blew continuously throughout the whole night.

  By the morning, the winds had intensified into strong dust devils in all major US cemeteries. Gravestones from most of the graves were blown off, leaving the graves open. Skeletons of the dead who had been buried there arose and jumped out of the open graves. They started running in different directions following the winds which were blowing towards all urban centers.

  The whirlwinds were blowing strongly over the houses that had been unknowingly built over old graves. Deep cracks developed in the floors of such buildings and skeletons of the dead rose out of them. Occupants in these houses were shocked by the sight of human skeletons cropping out of the floors of their bedrooms or living rooms. Such skeletons would run out of the buildings to join the others that had started occupying the streets.

  A tragedy had befallen the nation! Sudden, panicked predawn order to evacuate from all streets was given to the civilians by the authorities. Sirens from speeding police cars could be heard in the vicinity. Numerous police helicopters were also roaming above the buildings in all major US towns. They were dropping papers with worded warnings to the civilians, urging them to stay indoors. Local televisions and radio stations stopped their normal programs to broadcast guidelines which the citizens could follow to escape the danger.

  The military was quick to console the civilians with a promise to contain the situation. Foot soldiers from all US Army divisions were deployed on the streets to fight the invading skeletons and to provide rescue and first aid to all those that been injured in the attack.

  The soldiers started shooting at the skeletons but at first, the skeletons were not shooting back. Instead, they were just running aimlessly in all directions and causing chaos wherever they reached. But with time, the skeletons started attacking nearby gun stores and police stations from which they obtained different firearms and started shooting back at the human troops.

  Taking a precedent from the first two raids which the skeletons had performed on earth, all US Tactical Forces had been given orders to concentrate firepower on the skeletons’ joints especially the knees and ankles. It was the only assumed way of causing casualties to the skeleton ranks.

  Though the soldiers were trying hard to put the above order into effect, the skeletons were hard to hit because they were not standing in fixed positions. After firing stray bullets to disperse the human soldiers they would run away before the latter could respond appropriately.Unlike the US soldiers, the skeletons were not fighting to win but to confuse and disrupt the US Army, a mission which they had achieved. However, very few human soldiers were being injured because many of them were moving through armored vehicles. Others were snipers who were shooting from a distance, especially from the top of tall buildings where the skeletons could hardly locate them.

  As soon as the shooting began on the streets, the US Federal Aviation Administration issued an order to all civilian planes that had taken to the air that morning to take emergency landing on nearby airports. The airspace was cleared for the military planes which were planning to rise into the skies. NORAD issued standing orders to all USAF airfields to have ready squadrons of military planes, armed and prepared to take to the air to the defend the skies in a moment’s notice.

  The US President decided to drop the Continuation of Government Readiness Conditions from level four to zero and all US armed forces were ordered to DEFCON 3. The president was evacuated via the White House Tunnel System to the underground bunker at Camp David. The Secret Service took the US Vice President and other top ranking White House officials down into the White House bunker.

  The Federal Emergency Management Agency issued an order directing the 1st Helicopter Squadron from Andrews Air Force Base to the Capitol to evacuate the top Congressional leaders to the Mount Weather Emergency Facility. Army Helicopters from Davison Army Airfield evacuated all senior Defense Officials to the Raven Rock Mountain Complex, the alternate Pentagon where they to command the battle from.

  The attack had started at a time when Foreign Ministers from the world’s most powerful countries had gathered in Moscow. Following the second raid which had occurred on almost all continents, the world had realized that everyone was a potential target for the skeletons, but not only the US. Nations had decided to put their political differences aside and their foreign ministers had convened at the Russian Foreign Ministry Building on Smolenskaya Square at the center of Moscow, to discuss the future of mother earth. They had plans of forging a supranational force which was to be ready to defend the world in case such an attack occurred. The force would also aid civil authorities in maintaining law
and order and maintaining a supply of basic services to the populace, during and after the skeleton invasion.

  However, in the course of the meeting, a secret service agent approached the US Secretary of State. He leaned over him and whispered into his ears, “Sir, the US is under attack! Countless human skeletons have already occupied the streets of all our major towns and cities!” All delegates turned their attention to the US secretary of state as he stood up with a frowny face. He picked up one the microphones and shouted, “The world is already under attack! They have started with us……”

  He had not yet finished speaking when soldiers from the Russian Army stormed the building and called off the meeting. They were working on orders from the Russian President, who had also received the information about the attack on USA from their classified sources.

  The Russian Army offered to disperse all these foreign delegates to different army controlled underground bunkers to guarantee their security. Many of them were rushed to Ramenki Emergency Bunker, six miles away from Moscow. The Russian President had also evacuated to this underground town that was designed to shelter him and his family and many other VIPs in such periods of war.

  The US secretary of State and his Russian counterpart were flown by helicopter to the Russian National Defense Center, a top security fortified facility near Moscow River. For the first time in history, this Russian wartime complex was linked to the Pentagon’s National Military Command Center, its US equivalent. With request from the US Secretary of State, it was also receiving updates from NASA’s Headquarters in Washington D.C. Agents at the three facilities were tasked with round-the-clock monitoring of the world’s military situation. Russia and other countries were willing to provide any assistance to the US government mainly in terms of military support in case they needed it.

  A few hours later, their Satellite Early Warning Systems presented images of over twenty triangular aircraft on their computer screens. The aircraft seemed to be moving at a slow pace and were about to enter the US airspace. These UFOs had managed to evade all the countries’ space surveillance systems, despite the great effort each nation had put in to detect them in space.

  However, it was not too late for the US Military to intercept them. The US Army air defense fired their newly modified MIM-107A Patriot Guided Missiles to hit the UFOs before they could descend to the ground. traveling hypersonically at Mach 4, these surface-to-air missiles reached their targets and were seen hitting all the twenty aircraft with at most precision. Military officers, whose eyes were glued on the screens by then, cheered as they saw the last UFO exploding into fragments.

  Immediately NORAD ordered for the scrambling of more than fifty Lockheed Martin multirole tactical fighters from various US Air Force Airfields to the air. The squadron was consisting of more than ten F-22 Raptors while the rest were a mixture of F-15s and F-16s. Their mission was to spot any remnants of the UFOs which might have evaded detection and give them a deserving welcome before they could land on earth. Flying supersonically at Mach 2, the F-22 Raptors entered the skies first. However, just a few second later, pilots of the other fighters were shocked when they saw all the Raptors exploding at once. With a closer observation, the pilots saw a fleet of hundreds of triangular aircraft that were coming from space.

  Laser guided missiles fired by these triangular aircraft were the ones that had hit the Raptors and many more were homing against the remaining fighters. The pilots had no option but to eject their seats from the fighters. Many of such abandoned jets were hit by the missiles while others were seen in a circling descent before they crash landed on the ground.

  Actually, military officials had cheered for nothing because the Patriot Missiles had not hit any of the aircraft but they had been jammed into self-destruction by the arriving UFOs. The explosion of the twenty aircraft the Military officers had seen on their computer screens had been a computer simulation which the ghosts’ computer specialists had intentionally fed into their computer systems.

  After shooting down the fighters, the UFOs switched off their stealth and radar jamming systems. They did it intentionally such that they could reveal their arrival to the whole world. Radar screens at all military control centers in the world were crowded with a fleet of triangular aircraft which were flying in right echelon formation towards the earth.

  When the UFOs reached near low earth orbit, three small aircraft from the middle row echeloned through and moved straight to the International Space Station. All the three docked on the station and a group of twenty skeletons jumped out of them and entered into the station. They killed all human crew that was on board and took full control over the station. These twenty skeletons were the finest of all computer specialists the ghosts had trained. They were tasked with turning the station into the main computer hacking and jamming center for their operations.

  They installed the station with high-end computer systems, which had state-of-the-art data encryption programs and advanced means of automation, all of which had been made by the ghosts. They started with hacking into the altitude and orbit control systems of all manmade satellites in space. They orientated all the satellites that were to be of use to them towards their desired positions. Those that they were not to use were driven away from their set orbital positions while others had their antennas positioned in wrong directions. This resulted into disruption of their signal transition and reception from earth.

  All computer and telephone networks on earth were switched off at once. The ghosts also took over T.V, Radio and Military Communication Systems, causing a massive communication failure all over the world. Military officers at Pentagon were uncertain of what to do because they had lost control of the US Global Command and Control System to the arriving ghosts. They had no means of coordinating their soldiers on the battlefields to launch joint military offences against the aliens. But the last blow to their attempts came when the hackers switched off the US power grid which nullified most of their operations.

  When the aircraft started descending, seven of them remained in space and started shooting down the satellites which they were not ready to use and those they had failed to get access to. Each of these aircraft also launched a miniaturized satellite into low earth orbit to boost their communication systems. Three of these seven satellites were killer satellites which had been equipped with hot laser emission pumps. The ghosts hoped to use them to destroy missile war heads from other countries that would try to help the US.

  As the aircraft descended into the US airspace, darkness appeared throughout the whole country for a period of three minutes. The darkness was punctuated by strong lightning which deterred further attempts by the US Air Force to have more fighters take to the skies to intercept the UFOs. Even the Patriot Missile and other anti-aircraft systems had been switched off by the ghosts and hence the US army had no other means of preventing the aircraft from reaching the ground.

  By the time the darkness disappeared, all the skies had been filled with the triangular aircraft. The UFOs had managed to occupy strategic positions over all US landmarks. Due to lack of any means of communicating with Pentagon, pilots of all the military planes had to follow orders from their airfield commanders. Military planes from different US Air Force airfields started rising to the skies to battle with the UFOs. They started firing countless air-to-air missiles at the triangular aircraft. Their missiles were however exploding before reaching their targets after being hit by hot laser beams from the aircraft.

  In the first minutes of the aerial combat, the triangular aircraft concentrated on producing laser beams that were destroying the air-to-air missiles from manmade fighters. They waited for the fighters to expend most of their missiles before they started firing back. Their missiles had higher accuracy rates of hitting the target because of their advanced homing guidance systems. They were semi-autonomous in a way that once fired they would stick at one target and would follow it wherever it went, whilst taking evasive action against other projectiles and aircraft that
had filled the US airspace.

  Many fighters were shot down in a very short period of time. When the UFOs started firing their missiles, pilots of the fighters that had exhausted their missiles decided to abandon them. But still, as they tried to descend by parachutes, some would be hit by fragments that were coming from the explosion of their former planes which the missiles would have hit. Other pilots attempted to ram their planes directly into the UFOs after running out of missiles to use. But this was rather futile as it gave the skeleton pilots better chances of shooting the jets down with greater accuracy before they could reach them. Huge clouds of smoke and fire had filled many areas in the skies which greatly reduced visibility to the extent that some fighter planes ended up colliding with each other.

  After crippling the US Air Force, the UFOs separated into three groups. The first group which was consisting of highly maneuverable aircraft remained high up in the skies to continue with the aerial combat with the few US fighters that had persisted. These aircraft were also supposed to perform a reconnaissance patrol mission for the underground skeleton warriors. All the aircraft of the second and third groups descended to lower altitude to support the infantry skeletons, but they were assigned different missions.

  Those of the second group became long-range strategic bombers whose mission was destroying the enemy’s fortifications, artillery and supply lines. They started firing air-to-surface missiles at strategic targets like factories, US Army forts and shipyards. This was intended to demoralize US soldiers and to diminish their ability to wage further war. Bridges and cloverleaf interchanges of major state highways were completely destroyed to interdict communication and supply routes to the frontlines.

  The third group consisted of tactical bombers whose aim was countering enemy activity on the ground and supporting infantry skeletons in their offensive operations against human troops. They could at some points do dive bombing to obtain greater accuracy of the target before hitting it. The aircraft had been equipped with anti-collision sensors which enabled them to fly swiftly through urban concentrations with very tall buildings at very low altitude without colliding with any building. In open fields, they could operate at very short ranges to shoot directly at troop concentrations using powerful, accurate and rapid firing guns that had been mounted on them.