Invasion: New York

-17- Victory

John Red Cloud did pushups in an empty apartment on the fifth floor of Krupp Tower. He had been here for weeks on end. His food supply had dangerously dwindled and boredom threatened him with madness.

He’d endured as only a hormagaunt on the death path could. His ability to wait bordered on the supernatural. Now a terrible question throbbed in his mind.

On the radio, he had listened to the battle of Montreal and the swift American victory. That meant the rest of the GD Expeditionary Force would quickly lack munitions, food, gas—all the items needed to run a modern military. Ninety percent of the Expeditionary Force was out of supply. It would just be a matter of time now before the Americans starved them into surrender as they’d starved Chinese Third Front into submission this winter.

Clearly, the fight was nearly over. Now it was simply a matter of mopping up various defensive positions. Quebec would not remain in the German Dominion. Therefore, the Algonquian people would not have enjoyed true freedom under the GD no matter what the Germans had decided.

Did that mean he no longer needed to kill Kleist?

Red Cloud scowled as he forced out another rep. He kept fit and nimble in the empty apartment, even though he had not left it for weeks. Foch had given him the equipment he needed—an RPG and a heavy 12.7mm machine gun.

For this grave task, a sniper rifle was too chancy. Since John had told Foch he was willing to trade his life for Kleist’s, the French had given him proper killing tools to make certain the first part of the bargain happened.

Red Cloud sat down on the floor. He picked up a towel. It was crusted and stiff from too much use. Despite that, he wiped sweat from his forehead. Why trade a life for a life if killing Kleist no longer mattered to the war, to the GD occupation?

Yet that wasn’t the only question. He had stepped onto the death path. From his understanding, one could not step off such a path. He had committed himself. He had used the power of the death path to reach this place. He had murdered innocent men. To walk away now was blasphemy. The power of the path would recoil upon him and he would die anyway, in dishonor.

Red Cloud became glum. He was a marked man. He had taken the curse of death on himself in order to kill one particular man.

His smart phone beeped.

With a fluid motion, he reached the phone. A text waited for him. It was three words long: The third car.

The moment had finally arrived. It caused his head to throb and his eyes to water. He rubbed them until they were clear. Then he read the text again. After he finished, he dropped the phone on the floor. The thing hit and the screen cracked. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now. Nothing would ever matter again for him.

A feeling of cold calm swept over Red Cloud. Chancellor Kleist roared through Berlin in a motorcade. This time, Foch had discovered it in time. Kleist feared assassination. Therefore, he took extraordinary precautions to thwart attempts. He had dummy cars and many look-alike targets, and he seldom let anyone know the route he would take.

The Chancellor would be in the third car. Naturally, it was a heavily armored car. It had defenses.

Red Cloud shook his head. Nothing mattered but the execution of the plan. He must concentrate.

He went to the fifth story window and opened it. A cool breeze blew in. He picked up the RPG and readied it. Then he stepped to the window. He did not poke the RPG through the opening. He hung back. He didn’t want security personnel to see him too soon.

John rubbed his eyes as he waited. The backblast from the rocket propellant would likely start a fire in here. That didn’t matter either. No, nothing mattered now but the task. This was it. The German Dominion had insulted the Algonquian people. Retribution was finally at hand.

A helo waited nearby. John could hear the whomp-whomp-whomp of its blades. It was an attack craft. Several hovered above in order to protect the Chancellor. Their presence said, “If you attack Kleist you will die.”

A bleak smile twisted onto John’s lips. He would die. Yes. He would—

The smart phone beeped.

John gripped the RPG handles, bent his head and aimed down at the street. The first car of the motorcade appeared. He waited. The second came into view. Finally, the third and fourth came in quick succession. Usually, Kleist traveled with twelve cars.

The third car—John followed the car. As if the RPG was a shotgun and he hunted crows, he started from behind, swept over the vehicle and pulled the trigger.

The shaped-charge grenade leaped out, and the rocket roared to life. The missile flashed down at the street.

In the empty apartment, the backblast licked fire onto the wall. It ignited and began to crackle with fierce life.

Red Cloud threw the empty launching tube from him. He ignored the fire. Instead, he dragged the heavy machine gun into position.

On the street below an explosion blasted the front hood of the third car. It halted as others swerved and brakes screeched. One came to rest on the left side. Doors opened on the third car, but the new car blocked them from opening much. The car on the other side squealed its tires so smoke billowed. It shot away, allowing the right-side doors to open, which they most certainly did, as men and women boiled outside.

John pulled the trigger, and the 12.7mm machine gun began hosing bullets. He smiled widely. The bullets punched holes into the top of the third car. Kleist was tricky. He might be huddling in there, letting the others act as bait. But in case Kleist wasn’t that cagey, John aimed for the people scrambling out of the car. The heavy bullets tore into them so flesh and blood sprayed. The women weren’t Kleist…unless the Chancellor wore a disguise. Red Cloud shot them all. They tumbled onto the cement, and he kept firing into them, riddling their bodies, making them jerk and twist.

He heard the helo again, but Red Cloud never looked up at it. He didn’t care about it in the slightest. He concentrated on his task, working over the car one more time. He had to make sure that the trade, the bargain, succeeded.

Missiles whooshed nearby in the air.

John looked up now. Two missiles streaked straight at his window.

“I am an Algonquin,” he said. “I have avenged my people.”

The missiles entered the window, the empty room, and exploded, killing John Red Cloud and demolishing much of the fifth floor of Krupp Tower.

Father and son Higgins walked outside the city limits. This was the present location of the 1st Behemoth Regiment. The 2nd had finally begun to take shape, filled by the factory in Detroit.

“They called for you again,” Stan Higgins told his son.

“I don’t want to get you in trouble,” Jake said. “Maybe I should leave.” They’d talked about this plenty of times already.

Stan laughed the way a wolf might. “I don’t care about trouble if it means defending my son. What good is it fighting for your country if the government steals your children? No. If my government wants my service, it had better have some regard for the things I love. If my government hates the things I cherish, then I will no longer fight for them but actively work against the scoundrels. It’s my country I love, not the people in power.”

“You’d better not let any Homeland Security people hear you say that,” Jake said.

Stan’s eyes narrowed. “There may come a time soon when they better start telling me some good things—if they want to keep living.”

Jake took a deep breath. His dad had been angry for some time now. Maybe he shouldn’t have told him the whole story.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” Jake said. “Sometimes I wonder about the people in power.”

“Just sometimes?” Stan asked. “I wonder about it all the time.” He lightly punched his son on the shoulder. “Let me tell you a truth about people, about men and women. Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

“Who said that?” Jake asked.

“A British nobleman, Lord Acton,” Stan said.

“Hmm, I think he might be right.”

“History proves that he is.”

Jake grinned at his dad. “History, huh?”

“That’s right. Do you have a problem with that?”

“Does history show anything like happened with us against the GD?”

Stan became thoughtful.

So did Jake. He had been following the war news closely. Unit after unit of the Expeditionary Force had begun surrendering. The conquest of Montreal had kicked the props out from under the resisting armies. Give it a few more weeks, and General Alan could march up the Saint Lawrence River and take the rest of the rebellious Quebecers. America and Canada had done it, or almost done it. They had knocked one of their opponents off the continent. He wondered if Kleist’s assassination would take the GD all the way out of the war, too.

Jake glanced at this dad. “No historical insights?” he asked.

“I’ve been studying the campaign.”

“I bet,” Jake said with a laugh. That was an understatement. His dad lived for this kind of stuff. It was candy to him.

“What I find interesting were the masses of GD drones, particularly the Sigrids.”

“Not the Kaiser tanks?” asked Jake.

Stan Higgins had that distracted look in his eyes. “The European birthrate just couldn’t compete with the Chinese. The GD doesn’t have enough young people to field truly vast armies. Their answer was the remote-controlled drones, and the Kaisers, too. The number of Sigrids, however, was and is truly staggering.”

Jake waited.

Stan glanced at his son. “It does remind me of a historical parallel.”

“Fire away,” Jake said. “Let’s hear it.”

“Sometimes armies try to win the cheap way,” Stan said. “They search for a weapons system of very narrow application. That usually makes it much more inexpensive. Then they mass produce the new weapon and tell themselves it will change the way men fight wars. The Egyptians of 1973 during the October War had a brand-new thing, Sagger anti-tank missiles. They cost pennies compared to expensive tanks. During the first days of battle, small numbers of Israeli tankers attacked the Egyptians who had crossed the Suez Canal. Egyptian infantrymen with Sagger joystick-controlled, wire-guided missiles slaughtered those few tanks. For a time, everyone thought the day of the tank had ended. Cheap missiles would drive them from the field of battle.”

“They didn’t?” Jake asked.

Stan shook his head. “The missiles worked on a very narrow basis, suited for the actions near the Suez Canal. Once the Israelis used their tanks in a proper manner—with infantry support and heavy machine gun suppressing fire—they swept aside the Sagger teams. In fact, soon they crossed the canal themselves and encircled an entire Egyptian army in Egypt.”

“How’s that like what happened here to us?” Jake asked.

“The GD tried to win on the cheap using a narrowly utilized weapons system,” Stan said.

“The Sigrids are cheap?”

“Cheaper than enlisting flesh and blood soldiers,” Stan said. “Maybe as bad, the Sigrids quickly reached their culminating point of success.”

“Come again?” Jake asked.

“Let me explain it like this,” Stan Higgins said in “Professor” mode. “A specialized machine or weapon often costs less than a broad-based weapon. In the 1870s, the newly invented self-propelled torpedoes were married to fast steamboats as launching platforms. The battleships of the time were very expensive and the measure of a nation’s naval power. The battleships had long-barreled guns of large caliber that could not be depressed low enough to destroy the torpedo boats when they moved at night and came in at close range. At that time, the battleships mainly had armored the decks and superstructures. Below the waterline, they were exposed to the new torpedo.

“Many people then reached the ‘obvious’ conclusion. The day of the battleship had ended as the torpedo boats took over. A man named Jeune Ecole heavily influenced French naval policy in that regard. From 1877 to 1903, the French built 370 torpilleurs.”

Jake must have looked confused.

“That was the French name for the torpedo boats,” Stan said.

“Oh.”

“Now, the torpedo boats were effective against the old-style battleships,” Stan said. “But the very effectiveness caused those boats to reach their culminating point of success quickly.”

“What’s that mean in English?” Jake asked.

Stan grinned. “It means the old school navy people changed the way they built battleships. They put searchlights on the big ships to spot the torpedo boats at night, added smaller caliber, quick-firing guns to kill them and had sealed bilges built below the waterline to lessen the effectiveness of a torpedo’s hit. In harbor, they draped heavy steel nets over the side. They also created a new kind of warship, the ‘torpedo-boat destroyer’ or as it was soon known, a destroyer. In other words, they negated the torpedo boats’ strengths. Because they were such a narrow weapons system, their importance quickly dwindled. That meant those who had built too many torpedo boats at the expense of battleships lost out in the naval competition.”

Jake thought about that. Not for the first time, he wondered how his dad remembered all these arcane military facts.

Stan cleared his throat. “That’s what happened to the Sigrids, by the way. We found a way to jam the signal between the remote-controller and the drone. The small Sigrid became inert, and the cost-effective weapons system thereby because useless in too many instances. That helped us to turn the tide of battle our way.”

“Yeah, I think I see what you mean,” Jake said. He would have liked one of those jammers in the Niagara Peninsula. It had taken many dead Americans to buy their country time to figure out a way to defeat the little bastards.

Theirs boots crunched over gravel as they walked through an old streambed.

“So what happens now?” Jake asked.

“Concerning you?” Stan asked.

“We can start there.”

“Well, you’ve joined the tank corps, the Behemoths. For now anyway, even though the Detention people want you, they don’t have enough authority or firepower to come and get you. I’m still working on taking you officially out of their clutches. Until that happens, you have to lie as low as you can.”

“Okay,” Jake said. He’d been lying low all right. And he always carried a gun. If the MPs came for him…he planned to shoot it out until he was dead or they were dead. He was never going to let the Detention people get hold of him again.

He noticed his dad eyeing him. “So what happens next in the war?” Jake asked.

“Yes,” Stan said. “That is the question. We’ve knocked out the Germans, or will soon finish them in Quebec. That means we won’t be fighting a two-front war next year. It will be a one-front war between us and the Pan-Asian Alliance.”

“They’re getting ready for it big time,” Jake said.

“I know they are, but so are we.”

“You’re saying it’s a showdown then,” Jake said.

Stan mulled that over. He looked at his son. He was so glad to have him back, to have him alive. He wanted to send him far away so no one could harm him. But his boy had become a man, a soldier, a veteran. His heart burst with pride over him.

“It’s going to be a showdown with the PAA and the South American Federation,” Stan said. “We’re going kick the Chinese out of our country and teach them why it was a bad idea to mess with the United States of America.”

“I want in on that one, Dad.”

“Me too,” said Stan. “This time, we’re going to finish it and mop the floor with their corpses.”

A door opened in a dank prison chamber. A naked man with many welts on his body lay cinched to a table. Several women with electric cattle prods readied to shock him and make him scream yet again.

A beefy guard glanced at former General Mansfeld on the torture rack. “They’re letting him go,” the guard told the women.

“What?” the chief torturer asked in a smoker’s raspy voice.

“The interim governor says the political captives are being freed.” Without another word, the beefy guard left, shutting the heavy door behind him.

One by one, the women turned off their cattle prods. The ranking torturer studied Mansfeld. They’d had him several weeks now. He looked awful, a shriveled wreck of a man.

Walther Mansfeld turned his head, and his eyes burned with something approaching madness as he stared at her. He even managed a chuckle.

The chief officer wasn’t sure why, but her spine tingled with an emotion similar to fear. Maybe she should finish this mad dog, just kill him.

Instead, she warned him. “Make sure you do nothing to return to us.”

The threat didn’t seem to penetrate. He stared at her with those strangely burning eyes. This man was no longer completely sane.

“Help him dress,” she told the others. “I’m going to the office to fill out the paperwork.”

She went to the door, looked back at him once more. Should she kill him? No. Why risk her career? Thus, she failed to use the world’s best chance to escape a hellish future.

To the Reader: I hope you’ve enjoyed Invasion: New York. If you would like to see the story continue, I encourage you to write a review. Let me know how you feel and let others know what to expect.