FOX HUNTING We had reports of Russian scientists working on a siberite bomb in a mountain base nearby. It was rumored to be lightly defended, but I was getting leery of intelligence reports lately. We were supposed to remove that particular base from the race for the prize, but I got the feeling that, somehow, it wasn’t going to be as easy as the scouts said that it would be. Sure enough, as we tried to cross the ford into the sector, we were immediately attacked by Russian infantry with rocket launchers. Typical. Perhaps the long winter made our recon boys all soft. I ordered a fighting retreat, and we fell back to a safer position to reconsider our tactics. I radioed Powell and let him knew that I would be needing some reinforcements. Scouting west along the road, we found another ford that seemed to be deserted. We waited for the first batch of reinforcements, and then crossed in force. Although there looked to be little oil in the area, we found a deposit of siberite, and decided to set up shop nearby. By the time that the rest of the reinforcements arrived, we had built a lab, a barracks, and a siberite mine. We continued to build up the base, up until the point where we were utterly surprised by a group of Russian tanks. This came as quite a shock, since tanks aren’t exactly the most quiet of vehicles. The made enough noise once combat was joined, so it makes me think that the Russians have some sort of sound suppression technology that they were using during their approach. We just managed to defeat them, but without the reinforcements, we would have been dead meat. I expanded my scouting perimeter and told the troops to be on high alert, since another sneak attack could come at any moment. We added some additional capacity to the lab so it could handle siberite and opto-electronics research. We decided to use oil as a temporary power supply, driving in supplies of oil from across the river until we could get the siberite online. However, before that could happen, our mercenary friends from before drove up, saying that they since they had severed relations with the sheikhs, they had gone freelance. They were being paid by the Russians to attack us. As a result, since I suppose that they weren’t satisfied with the payment that the Russians were rendering, they were offering us the chance to pay them some more, so that they could attack the Russians for us. Blackmail is an ugly game, but I paid up, knowing that it would save some of my manpower. I sent them off with their loot, and prayed that they’d all be killed before they had a chance to use it. I cannot abide by traitors, especially those that demonstrate their lack of ability to stay bought. Since it looked like the situation was becoming more dire, I sent everyone to work, building up as fast as possible. Two siberite generators as soon as the tech was ready, and trench mortars. Soon after a truckload of materials from Alpha arrived, we were attacked again. Although they were spotted quickly, and were fairly easy to defeat, this attack worried me because it looked like these tanks had come from inside of the scouting perimeter. That was unsettling, to say the least. I intensified scouting in the direction that they seemed to have come from, and sure enough, the vehicles materialized just outside of a nearby forest. This seemed to me to be an unacceptable risk, so I decided to step up the timetable for our assault on the Russian base. Since exploration of the area had shown that there was no path to the Russian base that was accessable via vehicles, I upgraded our existing vehicles as much as the technology would bear, and left them to defend the base. I grouped my troops into groups of eight, seven soldiers and a medic. One group was composed of snipers, and the other had trench mortars. We advanced across the river on a natural bridge, which seemed to be the only possible crossing. It wasn’t a great place to make the crossing, but you do what you have to do when your options are limited. There were two vehicles guarding the pass. Luckily for us, their movement was confined by a narrow defile leading up to the pass. Since they couldn’t manuever well enough to attack us effectively, we easily dispatched them with the mortars. Coming to the end of the defile, we reached the Russian base. We defeated its defences without too much trouble, but there was a building there that we’d never seen the like of before. One of the soldiers wandered in, and seemed to be vaporized in a storm of lightning and noise. We thought that he had been killed, until he radioed a moment later, saying that he had been transported to the location where we had seen the tanks materialize before. So the Russians had developed some sort of short range teleportation. This didn’t bode well, but what else did, lately? We wanted this stuff for ourselves, but there wasn’t any lab attached to the main base. Me imagined that it must be somewhere nearby, so I sent people out to scout around for it. We soon found a hill covered in some sort of force field that impeded movement. I sent a soldier up through it. It slowed him down quite a lot, but didn’t hurt him any. I guess that the Russian hadn’t thought that that anyone could have defeated the base that we just finished off, since there was nothing other than the field in the way of defense for the lab at the top of the hill. The other side of the hill was another story all together. We decided to take the lab by going up the west slope of the hill, and following that around to the north, where we could climb up directly to the top. When we got there, we started pounding on the lab and shooting anyone who came out. Once they were all finished off, we went into the base and looted it for secrets. We found some pretty interesting stuff, and I thought that Powell would be pretty happy when we returned.

Introduction Mission 1 Mission 2 Mission 3 Mission 4 Mission 5 Mission 6 Mission 7 Mission 8 Mission 9 Mission 10 Mission 11 Decision Mission 12 Mission 13 Mission 14 Mission 15