It had been a long, hard fought battle, with the proverbial two steps forward and one step back. The First Rocky Mountain Liberation Force had survived three years of occupation, including two determined campaigns by the enemy to root out and destroy them. After all this time and effort, they were finally in a position to land a telling blow to the enemy. The commander of the 1st Rocky Mountain Liberation Front took a look around the bunker. He saw the scars of battle in the eyes of every one of his officers, but he saw more as well. He saw the iron resolve of men who would rather die free than live as slaves. They were men who would stand up and fight on with a fatal injury. They were men who would fight the most impossible foe and never waver, never flinch. He looked at them and begun with his traditional greeting.
"We've got them on the run gents, we've just got to let them know."
He let the grin fade from his face. "This one is going to take a little more out of us than usual, but it will be worth it. While I don't believe we have any Skee spies, not a word of this operation is to be spoken to anyone unless and until I give the go-ahead. We're about to give the Skee an introduction to the tactical lessons contained in ancient fables." The commander let a wolfish grin break out on his face. "It's a shame they'll never figure it out before we get them. The plan is fairly simple, we know they..."
The bunker door was shut, and Billy frowned. He learned long ago that figuring out what the big zeros had in store made life much easier. Generally they didn't keep things under wrap like this though. He went back to his bivouac site.
Homer was waiting. "What did you find out, Goat?"
Billy took a look at his good friend Justin. True names were rarely exchanged amongst members of the resistance. Almost everyone had someone back somewhere that could be hurt if there was the slightest hint of liberation collaboration. Most of the time those who shared their first name didn't share their last. The Skee had many twisted individuals who happily plied the trade of 'information extraction.' On Earth these days it was far better to be safe than sorry.
"Nothing worth mentioning Homes. They've got something big and fictional planned, that's all."
"Fictional?"
"Yea, the old man mentioned that the next one will be out of a storybook. You know how he gets, dig a mine because Cinderella lost her glass slipper."
"I think that op was from Snow White. Cinderella was the landmine one."
"Mines, mines. Same result in the end. It makes no sense but works anyway. Our commander, he's a clever one."
"One of these days he'll get too clever for his..."
"Not as long as the Skee remain too smart for their own good" Billy interrupted. It was an old argument, one that Homer hadn't won for the last year. Nobody stayed ahead of the game forever. As was said in Vegas before the Skee came, sooner or later the house always wins. Billy didn't like to dwell on the future. To consider the scope of the task of defeating an intergalactic race and freeing your race from servitude was mind boggling. That was the path to depression and suicide. Billy took things one mission at a time, and didn't try to let things get to him. Billy and Homer were broken out of the dark turn their thoughts had taken with the opening of the bunker door.
The commander stepped outside, followed by the rest of the officers. "Yellow."
Yellow was the code for orderly dispersal of the group. The camp broke into a frenzy of activity, breaking down and packing up any gear they might have out. Within a short time everyone was set to abandon the bunker site. Billy's officer was the first to move out. The group began heading to the south.
After they had traveled a short way, they turned more westerly. It was common for the different cells to prevent their fellows from knowing where they were heading. A secret door is most secure when only one knows where it is. Especially when the key to any secret door is a hot poker. After traveling for the rest of the day and making some further changes of direction, they arrived in a thickly wooded section that hid a small protected underground burrow.
Their officer, Lieutenant Planet, checked the area at the entrance to the burrow. The barricade they had built to keep the animals out was slightly open, although there no fresh animal tracks leading in.
The lieutenant called out behind him. "Fisher!"
"Yes chief?"
"Clear it."
Fisher was a tall, fairly skinny fellow with a long nose, resembling a wading wetlands bird in some aspects. Despite his apparent unsuitability for it, he excelled at maneuvering through tight underground spaces. Some people laughed when Fisher claimed it was because his father was a snake, but Billy sometimes wondered if he might be telling the truth.
Fisher finished fairly quickly. "All clear chief. No tampering."
All the hideouts had objects of some sort planted in them. The idea was that something might be ruffled through or moved by people that find any of them. Disturbance would be a sign to abandon this particular burrow and move on.
They filed down into the burrow and Vicks activated his EMF detector. "All clear."
Billy found a comfortable spot on the floor of the burrow and looked at his commanding officer. "What's the scoop, Chief?"
"This one is a sealed mission. You'll have to give me a minute." The Lieutenant pulled an envelope out of his gear and opened it up. He looked over it for a minute before he spoke. "We've got a nasty surprise for Mister Gray. The old man's cooked up a good one from an old fable about a deer. The basics are, we're gonna take down a major target this time. It's the Cheyenne Mountain Detention Center."
Billy's jaw dropped. NORAD herself. The closest that the Americans came to winning a battle. Billy was in the army prior to the war, stationed at Fort Carson. His unit was pinned down en route to relieve NORAD, and eventually crushed in detail when NORAD was captured. NORAD was gutted and now served as a reeducation center. Reeducation center being history's word torture to death camp. The SS could have learned a thing or two from the Skee. Billy listened carefully as Lieutenant Planet outlined the plan.
The plan was fairly straightforward. They would head for the front door, overwhelm the guards, free the captives, and then retreat through a tunnel another group prepared.
They rested for about a week, going over the plan and contingencies, and then moved out.

Frosty relaxed in the comfortable chair. 'They sure treat collaborators nicely.' He thought.
"So you are telling me they will hit it in less than a week?" The tall Skee towered over the short human sitting in the chair.
"As sure as rain. The entire mob operating in this area, in fact."
"They better, but for insurance you will have to stay here. At least until we have verified your story."
Frosty leaned back in the recliner. "No problem with that from me!" 'A guy could get used to this.' He thought.

Billy's cell met up with most of the other cells a short distance out of NORAD. The old man gave a quick pep talk. "We've got good Intel that this place will be practically deserted as far as guards go. Watch yourselves, you are all vital equipment to our war effort."
The old man waved over his officers and begun issuing orders. "Dearth, prepare your explosives. As soon as we breach I want that place to be deadlier than a bag full of cobras. Planet, back them up. Bulldog, you have point. Badger..."
The old man continued to remind the individual cell leaders of their tasks. Billy looked around. Frosty was supposed to be the lieutenant of the explosives squad. Dearth was a good leader, but a missing lieutenant did not bode well for the mission. Lieutenant Planet returned from his powwow with the big boss, and had his cell set up a perimeter around the explosive cell. After a minute, there were several loud reports, and then silence as the outside guards were overwhelmed. The explosives cell picked up their gear and advanced to the entrance. Billy saw the corpses of three dead Skee at the entrance. He gave the explosive guys a hand as they rigged the entrance with proximity bombs. After they were armed, they went deeper into the mountain, booby trapping the place as they went along. In the distance they heard sporadic gunfire, and once the telltale whoosh if a rocket taking down something a little too tough for small arms. They passed the wreckage of the little defenses the Skee could mount, and continued placing booby traps as they went into the facility proper. The explosive cell split up into two ten man teams, and that split a little later into five buddy teams. Billy's cell split appropriately, to continue to give support. They had fairly good schematics of the facility, and had planned their trap preparation carefully. They had all grouped together with the freed prisoners and main body pretty quickly, and finished trapping the facility as they went out the escape tunnel. They covered the tunnel on their exit, to camouflage their path of escape, and trapped it to seal both ends, wait four minutes, and collapse the entire thing for its eventual discovery. After just a short time of traveling away from the site, they heard some explosions in the distance, as the Skee discovered some of the gifts that had been left for them. The old man divided up the rescued prisoners into two groups. Ones who he had documented that had cracked, and those who hadn't passed on any vital information. The first group was allowed to join the Liberation force or be left to their own devices. The second group was also allowed to join the liberators, but if they declined could be put into contact with city dwelling supporters so that they could make a new life. Many joined the cause, having already been serving prior to their capture. On his way out of the area, Billy wondered about the missing Lieutenant Frosty.

"Mike Wilson. Major. 972 63 8479."
"I've broken things much tougher than you. Do you have any Idea who I am?" The tall Skee towered over him, its gray skin glistening a little in the florescent light.
Lieutenant Mike 'Frosty' Williams, former Major of the Tenth Mountain Division, Current Lieutenant in the First Rocky Mountain Liberation Forces, looked at the Skee, blood dripping from a cut above his eye, dug deep and answered the way he always hoped he would. "Real ugly."
"Where are your friends!" The Skee demanded.
"Look above you, they are holding your strings. DANCE PUPPET, DANC..."
The Skee backhanded him and spoke in a cold, heartless voice. "I am the exterminator of your race, it was I who purged Boston. You will..."
Mike William's face went cold. He interrupted the Skee. "Butcher of Boston, I've been waiting for you. Make sure to tell the hellish demon that rules over your afterlife to make room, for we plan to send your entire race to him soon."
With that, Frosty bit down on his cheek, activating the hidden detonator contained therein. Over the preceding months, his body had been turned into a bomb, with the sole goal of killing a particular high ranking Skee. It wasn't to teach the Skee a lesson. The Skee seemed to be incapable of accepting that they could learn anything from Humanity. The reason they did it was for justice for those on the east coast. Even before the fires had died in the rubble that was the Skee headquarters, the Liberation Radio was relaying the news worldwide.

"That's the signal, punch it!" The man known as Wodahs said to the driver of the APC.
The 1st Rocky Mountain Liberation Front had captured manuals on the flight systems for the Skee fighter craft almost a year before. The NORAD hit was a complex gambit to reduce the guard around the Skee hangers up in North Dakota. The radio broadcast was to serve as the order. The butcher of Boston had been given control over the area near NORAD, and would have wanted to punish bad information personally. Such an action wouldn't have been done spur of the moment, and as such the chaos between a second redeployment and the loss of command should cause enough confusion to prevent the Skee from responding quickly or effectively, or so the leaders of several of the Liberation Forces hoped. Both the Sixth and Seventh Rocky Mountain were in support of the hit that was to occur at the field in North Dakota. Commander Wodahs, the brother of the leader of the First Rocky Mountain Liberation Front, was leading the future fighter pilots. They brought enough forces and firepower to win against the base even if it was fully reinforced, but hoped for the smashing success of the gambit so as to reduce casualties. All of the smuggled armor of the central North America was deployed on this task. Humanity's armor proved to be a match for any ground vehicle the Skee had deployed. It could sometimes even punch through the shields that Skee-made vehicles used with the original weapons. The Tanks were certainly effective against any fixed defenses the Skee used, although the Fighter craft deployed by the Skee generally required Skee-made weapons to bring down. Fortunately for the liberation forces, most of the tanks had been fitted with such weapons over the course of the conflict. With a thunderous roar, the Rocky Mountain Liberation Front rolled into range of the outermost defenses of the enemy and unleashed the full fury of the captured weaponry. The Skee were caught off guard, and the outer defenses were crushed. They started to rally before being overrun, and managed to destroy a few tanks. With the defenses down, the APCs dashed around the tanks and unleashed their cargo. The unloading troops began to take sporadic gunfire from the buildings. Some of those were blasted apart by the tanks, some of them were assaulted by large amounts of troops. Some buildings, such as the Skee armory, were breached by tank and then assaulted by troops. Several trucks were driven up to take the spoils out of the armories. The base was quickly overrun with minimal losses. Their gambit worked! With all the fixed defenses down and the base relatively secure, the APCs holding the pilots rolled up to the Skee hanger site.
Wodahs looked at the soldiers standing perimeter guard around the hanger. "Good work boys!"
The lieutenant of the cell answered him. "No problem sir, now get those birds off the ground before their space forces respond."
The pilots rushed into the hanger and began getting through the Aircraft security protocols. It had been twenty-five minutes since the assault began before the first of the aircraft were brought online. The lieutenant of the perimeter guard came up to Wodahs, whom was frantically trying to get his craft active.
"We've got about twelve minutes before we estimate their space forces react. My men are leaving in two, we suggest you do the same sir."
"Understood." He stopped for a second and shouted out to his men around the hanger. "The APC is leaving in two minutes! If you don't think you can make it, abandon your task now and get aboard."
Wodahs got back to his task and answered the Lieutenant. "Take the APC with you, and don't worry about those who stay behind. We all have the pill, we will not be captured."
In the two minutes before the APCs departed, three of the pilots stopped work and returned to the vehicle. The other thirty-eight remained at their task. Seven minutes after the APCs left, twenty nine craft were ready.
Wodahs took a look around and called to the men "Prepare to bail!"
Seven of the nine men without active craft went off to other ready craft. One of them called to the remaining one. "Preflight me!"
In a few seconds, thirty craft were ready for launch carrying thirty-eight men.
Wodahs activated his radio and gave the order. "Yellow."
The fighters activated their engines and burned out of the building in clear defiance of Skee safety regulations. They all made it, but the building was not so lucky. The pilots blasted away from the burning hanger flying as fast and as low as they could. They all headed into the mountains, to the secret hangers that had been built for them. Some of them didn't make it, but in the end, twenty two fighters had been safely squirreled away by the Rocky Mountain Liberation Forces.

Operation Deer Heart was a rarity, a military operation that executed flawlessly. Wodahs's brother planned for each operation succeeding even if every other one failed, but the chain of successes ensured that casualties were drastically reduced, and gave the Skee the worst black eye that they had ever received. The beleaguered Swiss were given a breather as the Skee forces were redeployed to the Midwest on a brutal campaign of oppression. Regardless, NORAD was proven to be breachable by the people who built it, the Butcher of Boston was dead, and the Liberation movement had the ability to have air superiority in future conflicts.
The Skee retaliation was doomed to failure from the start. Tens of thousands were tortured to death. Instead of the desired result of ending support for the resistance, it had the effect that always has followed increased oppression of humanity. The Rocky Mountain Liberation Forces went from eight to seventeen separate divisions, and former collaborators turned to secret saboteurs.