Invasion: New York ia-4 Page 31

  “Do you want Kleist to succeed in his endeavors, cementing German dominance over Europe, over the world?”

  Foch stared at Red Cloud until he said, “The Expeditionary Force is winning. If Kleist dies, nothing changes. Another like him will rise up.”

  “You do not know that.”

  “But I do,” Foch said. “No. We cannot help you. Neither can we let you go.”

  Red Cloud grew tense, and there was a tightness under his heart, a sudden prick of pain. Perhaps it would be better to attack now and end the waiting.

  Foch might have seen him tense, or seen something about Red Cloud to trouble him. “However…” the Frenchman said.

  Red Cloud let his shoulder ease, and the pain under his heart receded.

  “If something dramatic should happen to change the North American situation…” Foch said. “I will have to ponder your information. It is very odd, very strange.”

  Red Cloud couldn’t think of anything wise or even pithy to say. He sat down. Once more, it was time to wait. He was willing to die, but he wanted to make his death worth something.

  The small Frenchman nodded to the three Serbians and headed for the door. He exited the safe house and turned the key, locking it again.

  The Serbians glanced at John.

  He lay down on the sofa, closed his eyes and practiced patience one slow breath at a time.

  NIAGARA PENINSULA

  Jake crawled through the bomb-blasted, moonlike terrain. Behind him were coils of concertina wire and the deep trench system of the first American line of defense. Far above, a crow circled lazily. To his left, Charlie crawled through muddy ground, passing straight through a puddle. The veteran ground-pounder must figure it was safer to crawl through the muck then to go around. The longer one moved through no-man’s land the worse it was.

  There were patches of dying, brown grass and long weeds here, but that was about it as far as vegetation went. Otherwise, there were shell holes, bloated, dead bodies, rusting drones and APCs and hordes of flies and mosquitoes. The annoying bugs made it a nightmare crawl.

  Like the others, Jake wore camouflage fatigues and helmet, and plenty of mosquito-repellant. He clutched an RPG, and he kept his M16 with him. He slunk across the ground very slowly. This had to be about the stupidest, most harebrained scheme of all. It was murder. Once he found his spot, he was going to turn his weapon on Franks and kill the bastard before he died. Crawling out into no-man’s land was too much, and it had Jake seething with righteous indignation.

  He wore face paint and he scanned the enemy trench system in the distance. The GD pricks had little black sticks in the ground: cameras or sensors of some kind.

  At times, Jake watched the GD outposts so hard that it felt as if his eyes would bug out. The enemy system was different from the American trenches. For one thing, the Germans didn’t have any people in their first trench line. Automated systems watched, and they were highly effective.

  A shot rang out, a militiaman shouted in pain, and one less newbie existed in the lieutenant’s penal platoon.

  Out of the corner of his eye to the left, Jake noticed as the man slumped as if the air had just hissed out of him. The dead newbie had to be eighty yards away. At least the platoon was spread out. Still, wouldn’t the enemy have a computer system that realized a whole bunch of fools was crawling around out here?

  “This is murder,” Charlie whispered.

  “Don’t talk,” Jake whispered. “And for Pete’s sake, don’t move right now. Stay still. Give it time to rest.” He meant give the enemy system time to dull down. From observation, they knew that once the GD system fired a weapons system, it was much more likely to do it again really soon.

  As if on cue, another shot rang out. This time, the targeted militiaman didn’t shout or yell. The bullet punctured his helmet and spilled his brains like jelly. He just stopped, end of reality that fast: snap, snap.

  The enemy trench system was higher up than they were. It gave the GD yet another advantage. Hadn’t the Germans had that advantage in WWI, in the trench systems in France? His dad would have known the answer. Jake remembered something about the Germans being able to look down into the Allied trenches, at least most of the time.

  For now, Jake remained motionless and it set his mind to whirling, thinking. He couldn’t believe he had survived this cockamamie penal screw-job for as long as he had. Franks had a death wish going for him, and higher command used the penal units for the dirtiest tasks.

  As he lay still, Jake used to his eyes to scan the situation. Nearby, Charlie waited like a mannequin. One thing the penal screw-job had done was turn Charlie into a decent soldier. In this outfit, either you got good fast or you died. It had been that way in Russia during WWII against the Germans, at least in the early years of 1941 and ‘42. Corporal Lee had already been good at this. Jake’s two new best friends were survivors, and they’d become canny in many different ways.

  “Can we move now?” Charlie whispered.

  “Give it a full twenty minutes,” Jake whispered, “and don’t get antsy.”

  A couple of minutes later, a fly buzzed near, and of course it landed on Jake’s cheek. He didn’t twitch a muscle and for sure he didn’t move up his hand to brush the fly away. He endured, and told himself he liked the feeling of the fly’s legs crawling over his skin. The thing crawled onto his eyelid. He wanted to roar curses and brush the fly away. He’d be dead if he did that, so Jake merely flicked his eyelid, and the creature buzzed away, to return soon and start the process all over again.

  The minutes ticked by in agonizing slowness. Finally, Jake continued his crawling trek. Maybe he was the fly, and he crawled upon the Earth’s face. Naw, that was stupid. One thing was certain; he knew where he planned to go. There was a shell hole thirty yards away. It looked deep. Likely it had water in the bottom, as it had been raining on and off for several days.

  Every night Jake took off his boots and socks and checked his feet. He dried them all the time and used the tip of his knife to scrape dirt from under his toenails. He told Charlie and Lee to dry theirs. Fungus had started to spread among the newbies, that and athlete’s foot. If your feet went, you were done, kaput. Was kaput anything like Kraut?

  Jake sighed. The word was that the Krauts had landed in Rochester. That couldn’t be good. He wondered what his dad was doing now. How was his mother? He thought about his old buddies. Man, Denver seemed like a lifetime ago. The strip club…what had ever happened to the girl he’d talked with? She’d been a babe, all right.

  Will I survive the war?

  He didn’t see how. He didn’t see how America would, either. We’re not the nation we used to be. How could he help America once again become the land of freedom? First, they had to stop the Krauts and throw the Chinese and Brazilians back home. Then, eventually, the real, old-fashioned Americans needed to take care of those who wanted to enslave the rest of them. Maybe once this is over it will be time for a civil war. The Davy Crocket Americans can set up their own country and the communist types can have their country, which won’t be America, but what the heck. It’s what they seem to want.

  Jake decided that as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t afford to use his last RPG to kill Dan Franks. The sergeant was a grade-A bastard. In Jake’s experience there was none worse. Franks deserved to die for the Americans he’d killed. The penal battalion militiamen were the real Americans, the kind who spoke up when those in power did something wrong. For evil to triumph, all good men must do is to do nothing. Some English theorist had said that a long time ago.

  The statement told Jake several things. One, there were good men and there were evil men. Those who said otherwise were idiots. Those who said ideas and culture were relative and equal to each other didn’t know what they were talking about. Those who said people should accept everything as being equal to everything else were straight up fools, and America had been listening to the fools for far too long now. Why didn’t they listen to the Daniel Boone types? That
’s why it had come to this. Having penal battalions was the socialist thinking of the schoolmen who wanted to brainwash the rest of America.

  For evil to triumph, all good men must do is to do nothing.

  Jake had spoken up, and that’s why he was in a penal unit. America, America: what had happened to the land of the free and the home of the brave?

  If I survive this, I’m going to change my country. I’m going to bring back Daniel Boone America. I’m going to fight to free her from the invaders, and then I’m going to fight to free her from the homegrown tyrants and their useful idiots.

  Thinking such thoughts made Jake feel better. Then enemy artillery opened up. There were loud, thunderous booms in the distance. Giant flashes told of big shells on the way.

  “That can’t be good,” Charlie said.

  No. That wasn’t good. Jake wanted to speed up, but he continued the slow crawl. If he moved too fast, he was dead. So slow and easy won the game.

  The enemy shells howled over them. Big, car-sized hunks of metal tumbled overhead. None landed among them. Was that a miracle?

  Who knew?

  Finally, Jake gained his great reward: a waterlogged shell hole. With infinite patience taught from the school of hard knocks, Jake slipped into the watery hole. The yellow water came up to his hips. Soon Charlie and Lee joined him, making tiny splashes as they hunkered down in the hole with him.

  “Now what?” Charlie asked. “We made it and the enemy is pulverizing our lines.”

  Jake squinted. He knew which outposts on their trench line were dummies and which were heavy machine guns and rocket launchers. He was pretty sure he knew the one that Sergeant Franks hid behind. If he lifted the RGP…

  Don’t be stupid, Jake told himself. Franks has been watching me the whole time. He expects me to shoot at him. If you want to kill the sergeant, you’ll have to let the Sigrids pass and attack Franks for you.

  That wasn’t a bad idea, but he kept it to himself.

  The enemy artillery thundered. The shells hammered the ground, searching for puny men hiding in the Earth.

  “Do you hear that?” Charlie asked ten minutes later.

  “All I hear is pounding in my ears,” Jake said.

  “Listen,” Charlie said.

  “Get down,” Lee hissed. The corporal lowered himself into the yellow water until only his head remained above it. The RPG lay higher up beside the shell-hole lip. Lee must have figured he could pick it up later.

  Jake still couldn’t hear a thing except for the artillery, but he followed Lee’s example. Charlie did likewise.

  Soon enough, Jake heard the squealing, clanking noise of Sigrid drones. His stomach tightened and fear began to claw for his attention.

  This is wrong. This is murder putting us out here. I should be safe in the trench. Why does it make any difference if we fire these from the front or the back of the machine?

  “Sometimes,” Jake said. Then his mouth dried up. The words wouldn’t come now. He wanted to close his eyes and just slip his head underwater.

  An AI Kaiser HK appeared in his limited gaze. The thing was monstrous, and it had a squat, ugly cannon. The 175mm gun was like a short stogie clenched between the teeth of a psychopath. The Kaiser had a host of antennae sprouting from its top. Jake had never been this close to one before. The monster had poking autocannons everywhere and heavy machine guns, and beehive flechette launchers up the ying-yang. The HK could murder them all, no sweat. The good guys didn’t have any heavy stuff, not out here in no-man’s land to take out Kaisers.

  Behind the Kaiser appeared another, and then a third and a fourth.

  Now we know where they enemy is making his main assault.

  “What do we do?” Charlie whispered.

  Jake stared at his friend from Idaho. The look said one thing: keep your yap sewed shut, thank you oh-so much.

  The three penal militiamen waited in their watery slop-hole. Three puny RPGs waited below the lip like metal sandbags.

  Trying not to look directly at the things, Jake counted seven Kaisers. There were probably more. He could only see so much ducked down in his hole. It was like being mice as a herd of elephants walked by, or being antelope as a hungry pride of lions trotted past.

  Treads clanked. Gun turrets rotated and barrels elevated. The ground shook and trembled as the big tanks passed. Bits of dirt from the edge of the shell hole plopped into the yellow water. It was like doom coming, and Jake feared the three of them would be buried alive as a Kaiser squashed them as he might squash a beetle with his heel.

  In the distance, artillery boomed.

  Is that theirs or ours?

  The artillery ended up being American, and it was aimed at the Kaisers, meaning the shells screamed down onto no-man’s land.

  We’re dead, Jake thought. It looks like our side is going to kill us after all.

  As the HKs rumbled past their shell hole—big, looming machines casting them in death-shadows—their flechettes hissed and machine guns chattered relentlessly. The autocannons chugged, spewing shells skyward. Jake saw a sight of a lifetime. The metal monsters knocked out the incoming artillery tank-killers. Black ink seemed to explode in the sky, violent art like an anti-Fourth of July. It was crazy-sick and it likely saved his life by keeping the Kaisers busy, even as shrapnel plunked and rained like hail into the soggy ground of no-man’s land.

  What am I supposed to think about this?

  Jake might have heard a man wail in agony. Had a piece of shrapnel killed the sucker? He had no way of finding out. His nostrils were just above the water so he could breathe.

  Then a Kaiser clanked its way directly over their hole. The two sets of treads passed on either side of them. They saw up into the oily underbelly. Maybe they could have fired a rocket and done some damage. Each of them just stared upward in shock and disbelief.

  The machine passed, and they breathed normally again. Shortly thereafter, the American artillery stopped firing. The Kaisers obliged and likewise quit shooting. Soon, the last Kaiser clanked out of no-man’s land and reached the first American trench.

  A few of the newbies must have had no idea of the AI tanks’ deadliness. Jake couldn’t believe it. As the last Kaisers clanked away, several unthinking newbies put their RPGs on their shoulders, aimed and fired at the enemy backsides.

  One Kaiser paused. Autocannons knocked down the shaped-charge grenades flying at it. It was like swatting fleas. Machine guns chattered for less than ten seconds. Every militiaman who’d fired a rocket died in no-man’s land.

  Jake, Charlie and Lee continued to wait. They eased up from time to time and watched the Kaisers take out the few MDGs who remained at their posts in the forward trench.

  Charlie looked at Jake as if he wanted to comment. Jake already knew what the potato-grower was going to say. “Where did all the MDG sergeants go?” Too few of them had remained at their posts.

  Jake could have told him where the others had gone, and no, it hadn’t been their own artillery killing them. Most of the MDGs took off before the Kaisers reached the trench system. It was suicide to fight the un-killable, and the detention guards certainly weren’t suicidal.

  After the Kaisers trundled out of sight, heading deeper into the American defensive system, Charlie finally spoke:

  “Now what do we do?”

  Jake was ready to tell him.

  “Wait,” Lee said. “I hear more coming.”

  Charlie turned pale. “Come on. That isn’t fair. Do you guys think that’s fair?”

  “These sound smaller,” Jake said, who had his head cocked.

  “Yes,” Lee agreed. “These are the Sigrids.”

  “Wonderful,” Jake said.

  “What are we going to do?” Charlie asked.

  “For one thing,” Jake said. “We’re going to wait right here. The Kaisers left us alone. I doubt the Sigrids will look for us either.”

  But Jake was wrong: not dead wrong, just wrong.

  Five Sigrids squealed and clanked
into view. Each of the smaller vehicles had its special tri-barrel, and they hosed bullets into the first penal militiaman, slamming an older man with white in his hair and blowing his head clean off.

  “They know we’re here!” Jake shouted. “Fire! Fire at them!”

  He didn’t know if anyone other than Charlie and Lee heard him. Maybe waiting out in no-man’s land had changed some of the newbies. Maybe watching Kaisers roll past had changed them.

  Five Sigrids faced a host of RPG-armed Americans in shell holes.

  “One, two, three, four, five!” Jake shouted.

  “I’ll take one!” Charlie shouted.

  “Two,” Lee said.

  “Yeah, I’ll take out number five,” Jake said. “It’s the farthest away.” He didn’t want them to all shoot at the same machine.

  Jake took a deep breath. “Ready?”

  His two best friends nodded.

  “Go,” Jake said.

  Each militiaman slipped up and took his RPG. The five Sigrids hosed death at everything. Their tiny turrets swiveled and the tri-barrels rotated as they spit flames and lead. Despite their smaller size, the things were living mayhem.

  With practiced skill, Jake readied his RPG, aimed it at the number five Sigrid and pulled the trigger. The shaped-charge grenade whooshed out. Beside him, Charlie and Lee’s rockets did the same thing. Other militiamen must have heard Jake’s instructions, because now all over the shell holes in no-man’s land, penal militiamen popped up and fired.

  These weren’t guided missiles. These were aimed just like a rifle or a BB gun. Dozens of rockets flew at the Sigrids. Most of the missiles missed their targets, burning past to blow up harmlessly out of range of any enemy.

  Charlie’s grenade hit, exploded and tore a tri-barrel into uselessness. Lee’s struck and launched the vehicle airborne enough to flip it so it landed on its rounded head. Jake’s destroyed a port, and the thing died. Three other HEAT grenades blasted the fourth Sigrid and obliterated it. That left one useable vehicle against the rest of the penal platoon.

  “All together!” Jake shouted. His voice was loud like a PE coach. “We have to fire at it all together.”