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Enemy Found
Enemy Found
Enemy Found
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Enemy Found

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Carnivorous aliens who are intent on eating the human colonists and Colonial Rangers.

It’s just two weeks into the alien invasion and the looming Battle of Winter Haven may be the end of the human presence on the eastern end of the Alpha continent.

The aliens have shrugged off their loss at McKinley Pass and plan to overwhelm the defenders with their biggest attack yet. Can the aliens be stopped at Winter Haven? Everything may depend upon it.

Still unaware that an invasion is in progress, Rick Cassidy’s daughter Ciara has made a strong impression on the Rangers on the starship Asia.

Demon wolves have been sighted watching the Cairo. The winter is less than two months away and the wolves will come down once the river and lake freeze over.

The girls from the New Hope Academy thought Rick Cassidy was a hero. Wait until they hear about Molly Pickford!

Some of the girls have unexpected skills that might contribute to their survival in the future while others are known for their leadership abilities.

Major Naomi MacCaffrey turns to some of her housemates for advice. The question of the hour is: What would Cassidy and Pickford do?

If you liked the first books of the Fierce Girls At War series you will love Enemy Found, the 8th installment of the saga of the ‘fierce girls’ war against the aliens. Click the BUY NOW button at the top and continue your journey now.

“The aliens killed half my company including my commander at Southport. It’s time to pay them back in full.”
-Captain Eva Zhang, CO, Tiger Company, 3rd Battalion, Colonial Rangers, New Hope Colony, China

LanguageEnglish
PublisherMike Adams
Release dateJun 23, 2018
ISBN9781370957811
Enemy Found
Author

Mike Adams

Born in Brooklyn and raised in Staten Island, NY. Mike has a BS in Business Admin from Wagner College and an MBA from SDSU. A retired US Navy Lieutenant Commander, Supply Corps (Logistics), a former small business owner, and part-time substitute teacher. he's visited 6 continents and 36 countries, speak Spanish, some German, a little Italian and a little less French. He currently lives in Chula Vista, CA with his wife Chris.

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    Enemy Found - Mike Adams

    Chapter 1

    Nikola Dubrovski

    September 28 2126

    Day 16

    CTL Cairo

    Growing up in Russia, Nikola Dubrovski was a brilliant student but moody at times. She was 15 in August 2122 when she boarded the cargo supply ship North America with her father Gregor and first met Rick Cassidy and Molly Pickford. It was a meeting that would have some serious positive effects on her future.

    She’d passed all her requirements to go to the colony and the New Hope Academy easily but six months before departure she fell in love with Dimitri Sharansky, a 17-year-old at her school. She told her father that she no longer wanted to go to the colony but Gregor and her mother Natasha were adamant. Not only had she been working towards this for two years, but students graduating from the New Hope Academy were competed for by the world's best colleges and universities. They were offering top-notch educations for free – tuition, room, board, everything – to get New Hope Academy graduates on their campuses. Their experiences living on another planet were invaluable and they had all been top of their class students even before they went to the colony. Her parents also wanted to get her away from Dimitri.

    A varsity soccer player as a freshman in high school Nikola was not only a very intelligent girl but she was a tremendous athlete. She was the youngest player on the varsity volleyball team during the winter season. She often went on hiking and skiing trips with her father in the mountains near the mining facility where he was the top manager and she enjoyed rock climbing and snowboarding.

    During the last month on Earth before their departure, Nikola was often sullen and unhappy. Knowing that Nikola was leaving, Dimitri had already moved on to a new girlfriend, which only increased her unhappiness. Besides leaving Dimitri, Nikola was not happy that she was leaving her mother and her younger sister Sonja behind as well. Sonja was only 11, three years too young to go to the colony so her mother was also staying behind with her. The opportunity for her father Gregor to become the general manager for Aricola Mining at the New Hope Colony was too great to pass up and if he turned it down, he might not ever get another chance. Gregor’s new salary was going to be vastly greater than it had been on Earth and Natasha, who was a computer specialist, and Sonja would follow once she was old enough, providing that she also passed all the qualifying exams. Gregor and Natasha were already considering making their move to the colony permanent.

    Nikola's attitude began to change when she and her father were boarding the cargo supply ship North America for the voyage to the New Hope Colony. Her father nearly had a heart attack when he recognized the two American heroes who had killed Hassan Gul and four of his sons, Marine Staff Sergeant Susan Bennett and Navy Lieutenant Paul O'Brien. The pair had supposedly been murdered less than a week before and Gregor had been one of Bennett's and O'Brien's, biggest fans since the worldwide broadcast that had shown them killing the terrorists. He was devastated and had cried when he learned that they'd been killed, especially at the death of Susan Bennett.

    Gregor’s interest in the two Americans was personal. A few years before those same terrorists had killed one of his closest family members, Lena, a beautiful younger cousin who had grown up with him, and who he regarded as his little sister. She'd been working in a lab at an oil refinery that was attacked and was one of the more than 100 innocent civilians murdered there by Hassan Gul and his men. The whole family had celebrated the death of Gul and four of his sons. Unfortunately, that still left two living sons who vowed revenge on the two Americans. For several months, the two brothers pursued Bennett and O’Brien from one hiding place to another until they apparently caught and killed their quarry.

    It turned out that what the world had seen broadcast through the helmet camera of one of the team of assassins was not exactly what had happened. In a close scrape O'Brien and Bennett had escaped death with the assistance of Naval Intelligence, a team of Navy Seals and Colonel Robert Black, who had become a family friend and was the prospective commander of the Colonial Ranger regiment at the New Hope Colony. Lieutenant O'Brien had been shot three times during the episode that had provided them the chance to fake their deaths but his wounds, though very painful, were not serious. When Gregor recognized them and told his daughter who they were she too was astounded; then realizing what else it meant before her father did, she laughed out loud. O'Brien's 10-year-old daughter Ciara McCord O’Brien had been there and she had screamed and cried over the body of her murdered father; Nikola thought that little girl must be quite an actress, she had to have been in on it.

    For the first two weeks of the voyage on the North America, Bennett and O'Brien stayed out of sight. Gregor realized that O'Brien really must have really been injured and now Bennett was caring for him until he recovered. He’d noted that the lieutenant was limping as he boarded the ship and was probably on some strong pain meds to help him get through the boarding and takeoff process. When O’Brien finally did make an appearance in the ship’s cafeteria Gregor took Nikola over to their table and they introduced themselves to the two Americans who were friendly and said their names were Lieutenant Commander Rick Cassidy and Gunnery Sergeant Molly Pickford. Neither Gregor nor Nikola ever told either one that they were aware of their true identities.

    The four became good friends and the Americans sometimes took Nikola down to the ship’s virtual-reality trainer that was usually off-limits to all but Ranger personnel. They taught her how to shoot in VR and over time she became quite good at it. They even allowed her to fight demon wolves in VR, the major predator that inhabited the mountains of the colony's major continent where all exploration and development was taking place. The whole purpose of the Colonial Rangers was to protect the survey and exploration parties searching for resources in those mountains. Demon wolves hunted in packs and were very difficult to kill; they were the greatest danger the humans had encountered on the planet so far. There might be something worse on one of the other two major continents but very little exploration had been done on either one of them so that remained to be seen.

    By the time they arrived at the colony, Nikola had turned 16 and she was matriculated as a third-year student at the New Hope Academy. The Academy was a boarding school, all of the students lived in the campus dormitories, and it was more like a small college than a high school. She’d begun her academic studies well before they departed Earth and like the handful of other students on the North America, she took a full course load throughout the six-month voyage. Nikola thrived at the school although she sometimes went through bouts of homesickness; she missed her mother and her little sister. Not long after arriving, she met Stormy James and Venus Bennett, two girls in her class who shared her frustration at way some students acted towards other students with little or no repercussions from the school's administrators. The administrators often felt that their hands were tied by politics, clashing cultures and parents who often lived in settlements thousands of miles away and were often in key positions in the colony and not available to come in on short notice. Nikola and some of her more aggressive female classmates decided that some steps needed to be taken to protect the younger girls, and some boys as well, from some of the more aggressive and immature boys on campus who wouldn't keep their hands to themselves thinking that they were immune to punishment.

    Nikola was the leader of this group and she’d been inspired by how Rick and Molly had handled some difficult personnel related situations among the Ranger regiment. The multi-national character of the Colonial Rangers and its accompanying politics often made dealing with situations related to sexual harassment, or worse cases, extremely difficult. Cassidy and Pickford, with the assistance of some of their friends in the Regiment, had taken on those types of problems on their own, covertly, without involving the Colonial Administrator, the Regimental Commander, or Colonial Security. They’d been very effective in this endeavor and there weren’t as many problems now as there had been before; and they hadn’t had to actually kill anyone. Yet.

    Despite the rigorous screening process they all went through sometimes well-balanced 14-year-old boys became hormonally challenged 16 and 17-year-olds who would take advantage of the girls if they had a chance. Nikola’s group included most of the girls who would be chosen as squad leaders by Commander Cassidy and Gunnery Sergeant Pickford two years later. By then she and some of those friends had graduated but had stayed on as interns working at the school, some of them waiting for younger siblings to graduate or in Nikola’s case, waiting for her little sister and mother to arrive, before returning to Earth to attend one of the world’s elite universities.

    There had been 50 girls including Nikola and three other interns, Stormy James, Venus Bennet and Chloe Capps, plus 11 staff members from the Academy, on the spring internship tour of the eastern settlements. They’d boarded the 850-foot-long antigravity transport Cairo late the night before departure from the coastal settlement of Southport and it just happened that Rick Cassidy and Molly Pickford were also traveling to the eastern settlement of New Cancun. Nikola had seen them regularly over the past three and a half years, Molly Pickford especially, and she was happy to see them on the transport.

    Less than a half-hour after takeoff, they inadvertently flew over a fleet of seagoing ships the technologically advanced alien Rift, dubbed ‘Jammies’ by the Rangers, were using to transport their army of giant semi-primitive Andoval warrior mercenaries, known to the human as Raagaas, from islands further south. Plasma bolts from the energy cannon mounted on those ships badly damaged the Cairo's antigravity cells. Although they were able to escape over the mountains to the north of the coast, they had to make a difficult landing in a mountain valley 500 miles north of Southport. The valley was 700 miles short of the safety of the settlement of Winter Haven. All of the girls had survived but four staff members from the Academy were killed along with 20 of the transport’s crew of 27 Rangers. They died on impact, some while making valiant efforts to secure the students in their crash couches. Several girls and staff members were injured, some of them seriously. Nikola and some of the older girls, many of them veterans of her unofficial ‘vigilante’ student enforcement group, stood out from the beginning as leaders among the students.

    Cassidy and Pickford, and the handful of Ranger NCOs who survived, began training all of the students and teachers to fight right from the beginning. They knew there was little hope of rescue anytime soon, no one knew where with the communications satellites destroyed. They had just three months before the winter season began and the demon wolf packs that were watching them would descend into the valley. There was also the chance that the aliens would discover them, which they did a month after the crash. They had to prepare themselves for a likely attack by the aliens who had already taken the eastern settlements of Southport, New Cancun and New St Louis. The short 60-day summer season had begun and no doubt Winter Haven and then the eastern settlements were next on their target list. In the meantime, Cassidy and Pickford’s ‘Company’ worked hard to get ready for the dangers that would inevitably coming looking for them.

    Chapter 2

    On A Short Leash

    Winter Haven

    While Major Claudia Stairs was on her way to New Hope Town, the Regimental Commander General Gavin Jamison had arrived in Winter Haven in the late afternoon and had dinner with the settlement’s director Byron North. After that, he’d gone to meet with Colonel Colin Fox to discuss the defenses the Rangers had set up south of the town. He also talked with Fox and his staff about the food shortages the aliens might be having and was gratified to hear that Fox and Lieutenant Colonel Takahashi had already considered the same idea and were taking action to make it more difficult for the aliens to forage for food.

    A light rain fell in the evening but by mid-afternoon, the following day things were drying out. The sun was warmer than Jamison had expected when Fox brought him up to the forward command post atop a hill overlooking one of the main approaches to Winter Haven from the south. The hill was thirty miles south of the center of the settlement, and two Ranger companies were dug in all along the ridge overlooking the road that ran from the town to a group of farms that were situated both north and south of the line of hills the Rangers were using as a defensive perimeter. There were only a handful of gaps in the hills, which the aliens could use to move towards Winter Haven. Colonel Fox had all three under watch, with defenses being improved by the hour.

    How are your people dealing with the weather out here? Jamison asked Fox as he surveyed the line of tents set up on the backside of the hill on a somewhat level area where the two companies’ vehicles were also parked.

    Fortunately, the weather’s been good for the most part. Last night’s rain was the first in nearly a week and it’s been comfortably warm. I’ve got the various companies rotating between their defensive positions and the Ranger barracks by the terminal. Space is at a premium there, everyone is doubled up at best.

    I see your preparing some bunkers on the hillside, Jamison remarked to Fox. And barriers on and next to the roadway to slow them down.

    It’s a start, Fox agreed. The five companies that came with Kenji have helped a lot but we’re going to need more. I’ve sent out scouts over a fifty-mile radius to set up observation posts. They’ll push further out if possible once we get more comm relay stations set up. I want to know when and where they land, how many there are and where they’re going. We’re also looking at installing some remote cameras but that will have to wait for now.

    You’ll have three more companies on their way, probably in six to seven days, Jamison told him.

    Three? You’ll be stripping First Battalion of half its strength or more, Sir. Are you sure that’s wise?

    No, actually, Jamison said. But we have a full company’s worth of former military about to finish their retraining. They’ll be replacing the personnel lost by the companies hardest hit during the fighting and sent back to New Hope Town, so you’ll be getting some people with experience fighting the Raagaas. We’ve got another 800 volunteers under training. Most of them have no prior military service so it will take longer to get them ready.

    Glad to hear it. I didn’t know any of the volunteers were so far along.

    They entered the command post where Claudia Stairs sat at a communications console talking to a dark-skinned officer who Jamison recognized as Major Luke Hazlett. Hazlett was at McKinley Station with two companies charged with the defense of McKinley Pass. The CP was otherwise empty. Stairs was just finishing up with Hazlett, Okay Luke, we’re putting together as many of the mines as we can from the material you brought back from New Hope Town. You should be getting at least fifty tomorrow.

    "Thanks, Claudia. I’ll let you know when our recon shuttle gets back. Should be in about three hours. Talk to you then."

    Later, Luke, she said then closed the connection. Welcome, General Jamison.

    Major, I thought you were in New Hope Town! Jamison said, surprised to see Stairs who’d gone there to brief the General not knowing that he’d already left for Winter Haven.

    "I was, General. I took the next transport back here after the briefings were finished. At least I was able to get a good night’s sleep in one of the Moscow’s crew cabins. There was no room at the inn in New Hope Town."

    Didn’t want to stay at Cassidy’s residence then? he asked.

    "The place is full and then some. Mattresses on the floor space only. I did have an early dinner there and got to relax for a while before coming back. Moscow left New Hope Town at 1730 yesterday, New Hope Time and I arrived mid-morning today."

    Relaxed in the hot tub, I suppose?

    Stairs chuckled and replied, You know about that? Of course, obviously you do. And yes, I did.

    One of Cassidy’s little perks, eh? Fox said with a chuckle. I’m glad to have all the ammo and odds and ends but I still don’t understand how he gets away with some of the stuff I’ve heard about.

    Jamison looked at Fox and considered his response. He knew that Claudia Stairs was a longtime friend of Rick Cassidy and Molly Pickford, and Colin Fox was going to find out eventually. Have a seat Colin, Major. Fox looked at Stairs who shrugged and looked back at him impassively.

    Major Stairs, you’ve known Rick Cassidy and Molly Pickford for quite a while, haven’t you? Jamison asked

    Yes, Sir. Over three years. They are both good friends.

    "Did they ever tell you about why they really came here?" he asked.

    Stairs blinked several times, Sir? They’ve always been kind of vague about their past. I know they came here together and they knew each other before coming here, that’s about it. They’ve always been rather coy about revealing that subject. They’d just laugh and say that it was something of a ‘we’d tell you but then we’d have to kill you’ type of situation.

    Jamison chuckled, I see, just wondering. I thought you might know more about them. They weren’t supposed to tell you but you never know. The Regimental Commander looked down at the folding table before looking up at them and continuing, Colonel, Major, I suppose this may no longer matter but still this is not for general dissemination. Clear? he asked and waited until they’d both responded that they understood. This is still classified top secret. Do you remember the attack on the US Consulate compound in Cameroon four plus years ago by Hassan Gul and his group of hired thugs? The two officers nodded, That was Cassidy’s ship that was making a show the flag visit and he was at the Consulate preparing for a diplomatic reception there when Gul’s men attacked. Both Fox and Stairs looked at him wide-eyed in surprise.

    There were only about a dozen or so Marine guards present and half of them were killed or wounded in the first couple of minutes. Cassidy and Pickford, that is, Lieutenant Paul O’Brien and Staff Sergeant Susan Mollison Bennett, ended up organizing the defense that held them off until help arrived. The ambassador’s three daughters were caught in the open and Gul himself along with two of his sons were holding guns to their heads when Rick walked out of that building with Molly right behind him. Second Battalion’s two senior officers sat in shocked silence as they tried to comprehend the stunning news. They both knew the story well although Stairs had left Earth with her detachment soon after.Gul demanded that the Marines come out or he’d kill the girls one by one as he had the Assistant Consul. Gul had it out for the Marines because they’d killed two of his other sons a few weeks earlier. It was actually Bennett and her squad who’d killed them. She killed the two brothers herself in fact, although Gul had no way to know that. The world was watching this live, as they walked out calm as could be. When the sound system began making a horrible deafening wail, they took the baddies by surprise and Rick put one right in Gul’s head then they took out both his sons and a couple of other bad guys, grabbed the girls and got them safely inside. Neither one got a scratch. The other Marines in the building then cut down about half of Gul’s men and by the time the cavalry got there it was pretty much all over.

    They both got a Navy Cross, she also got a Medal of Honor for the earlier action, and he got the ambassador’s oldest daughter too, I hear, he said with a little chuckle. And they each got a hundred million or so dollar bounty for their heads on a stick. Gul’s other sons were a bit peeved; I think. It was O’Brien and Bennett’s bad luck that the whole thing was being broadcast live worldwide by that reporter who was there for the reception. Their names and faces were everywhere.

    Both mouths hung open before Fox said, That was him? My god! I remember when that happened! That was big news. But I thought they were assassinated by members of Gul’s network, a few months later! It took them, what? Three tries to get them?

    Jamison nodded and said, They actually tried and failed three times on Cassidy and four times on Bennett if you count the bomb that killed her roommate. From what they told me, it was his 10-year-old daughter Ciara, who first suggested that they fake their deaths and come here and he got ahold of the right people to make it happen. It was almost too late when, fortunately for them, the kill squad that attacked their safe house was intercepted. They used it to cover their supposed demise. Talk about dropping off the face of the Earth, literally.

    Even Fox looked impressed and remarked, "Well, well. Now I really do hope we get to see them again. Apparently, they are hard to kill, and perhaps they really are out there somewhere with those kids. Now I begin to see how they’ve gotten away with doing some of the things that I’ve heard about since I got here including their little private stockpile of weapons and other ‘odds and ends’. They’re really not afraid of doing much, are they?"

    Jamison shook his head, "No, they’re not. So, you see now, there was more to them then just having some extra latitude. They really seem to have no fear of doing anything anymore. Since

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