Grudge: Operation Highjump

by Brian Parker

  “Please, turn it off!” he begged. “I will tell you where the Nazi base is. I will work for you—yes! That’s it. I’ll work for the Americans against the Nazis. Anything, just—”

  The video stopped abruptly and a black screen replaced the older footage. A small shape appeared in the center of the screen and got larger until a circular blue emblem filled the center of the screen. Inside the circle was a white shield with what appeared to be a compass rose emblazoned across it. The head and shoulders of a bird of prey—likely an eagle, although Berndt had truthfully never seen one before—rose above the shield over a red and white bar. Along the bottom was a yellow scroll that bore the words he recognized as ‘United States of America’. There were more words above the eagle, but Berndt never learned to read English, only to speak it haltingly.

  “Germany today,” a female voice announced, surprising him. Up until now, all the videos he’d been shown were narrated by men. Easily thirty or forty hours of dull, monotone male voices speaking softly for the benefit of their listeners had trained him to expect the same when the new video came on.

  This video advanced rapidly in color, another stark difference between the other films. It showed what the Fatherland looked like today, eighty years after the end of the war. Germany had one of the strongest economies in the world and was a staunch ally of the United States. The people they showed seemed to be happy and the nation appeared to be truly prosperous. The architecture was grand and imposing, like the pictures young soldiers were shown during their education, except different. This was newer, more cleanly defined than what he’d seen.

  The realization that everything about the outside world was a lie hit him hard. He’d known that a lot of it was rhetoric to stir up the masses, but there hadn’t been a single shred of truth in anything that he’d learned as a child.

  The video of Germany Today ended after segments on each of the vastly different cultural regions of the nation. The lights turned up, making him wonder when they’d been dimmed.

  The door handle jiggled behind him and a rush of fresh air entered the room as the doctor came in. He sat in the chair and wrinkled his nose at the stench coming off of Berndt.

  “You are ready to talk?” the doctor asked.

  “Yes! Yes, sir. I’ve seen the wickedness of the Nazis. I don’t want any part of that.”

  “So, you want to cooperate with the United States, is that what I’m hearing?”

  “Yes. Those people were treated worse than animals.” He jutted his chin toward the screen. “That’s not humanity. The Reich lied to all of us. They need to pay for what they did.”

  “This will not do,” the doctor stated, surprising Berndt. “Guards! Come in here.”

  He twisted in the chair, trying to see behind him, but it was no use. The movement sent spasms of pain through his aching body.

  “Yes, Doctor Grossman?” a familiar voice asked.

  “Please, take Oberleutnant Fischer to one of our guest suites and help him change out of his filthy clothing.” Doctor Grossman looked back at him. “Berndt, the guards are going to take you to a room and let you shower and get a few hours of sleep. Then we’ll talk about what we need from you. What you can do to help us make this right—and to make the Reich pay for their transgressions against the Jews, the Poles, the Russians and the Gypsies.”

  Berndt nodded his head. The Nazis were likely the most terrible thing to have ever happened to this planet and he was ashamed that he’d believed their lies. He vowed to himself that somehow, he’d make it right.

  The doctor sat, watching as the guards unwrapped the chains securing him to the chair and helped him to his feet gingerly. Agony enveloped him when they released the handcuffs from behind his back. His shoulders screamed in protest as the muscles in the front of his body contracted after having been stretched wide for so long.

  The guard with the embroidered red letter B on his hat leaned over and said, “I’m sorry, Oberleutnant, but I’ll have to secure your hands in front of you.”

  He carefully positioned Berndt’s hands in front and reattached the handcuffs. The pilot was amazed at his changed nature. “This way, sir,” the other guard said, gesturing the opposite direction from where he’d gone previously to return to his cell.

  They led him to an elevator and went up several floors, then got off on the sixth floor. Three doors from the elevator, a doorway stood open, with light flooding into the hallway. The guards indicated that he should go in, so he did.

  It was a bedroom of some sort. There was a bed, a couch, a television and a window! It was nighttime outside; the stars twinkled softly through the glass.

  “The bathroom is off to the left here, sir. You’ll find towels, soap, shampoo, and a toothbrush. There are clothes in the drawers under the television and we’ll have food delivered to the room in about fifteen minutes. Any questions?”

  “Yes,” Berndt replied. “Did I fall asleep watching those horrid documentaries? Please don’t wake me from this dream.”

  The hat-wearing guard smiled. “Welcome to America.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  19 July 2025

  Hillcrest Heights, Maryland

  Gloria needed sleep. Real sleep, not the half-assed in and out of consciousness that she’d gotten the past two nights.

  Across the parking lot, only five hundred feet away, was a Budget Inn. Her aching back longed for the beds that the small motel offered and the possibility of running water for a shower seemed appealing as well. Instead, everyone who wasn’t on watch tried to rest wherever they could underneath the platform’s roof. Gloria had learned to hate the hard, red hexagon tiles. They’d been stuck in the Metro station for two days as scores of German soldiers patrolled the area, searching for their quarry.

  The night they fled Fort Ricketts, the platoon had engaged in a harrowing game of cat and mouse. The only reason they lived was because of the drone that kept watch over their surroundings, telling them when it was safe to travel and when they needed to hide. Once they made it to the Naylor Road Metro Station, Captain Murdock assessed that it was too dangerous to continue moving that night and ordered them to hunker down in the Metro station.

  It turned out to be a brilliant tactical decision, but a poor strategic one. The elevated train platform offered very little in the way of protection from the elements or from observation, so the Germans dismissed it as an entirely unlikely location for a group of soldiers to pick as a base. They were left alone and the overhead cover provided concealment from enemy drones that crisscrossed the sky above, but they could see the patrols searching the surrounding houses and run-down businesses. They’d missed their opportunity to get away before the noose tightened. Now they were stuck.

  “Alright, it looks clear. We’re going to send up the drone,” the captain whispered loud enough to be heard by Gloria’s entire group. He’d been good about keeping them informed. Apparently, his parent brigade was sending a relief element toward them since getting the colonel’s information—and hers—was one of the most important tasks besides killing the Germans.

  The whine of the drone’s four engines filled the platform and the small vehicle shot skyward at the farthest point away from the stairs coming from the first floor. When possible, the platoon flew the drone every two hours to see what was going on around them. It wasn’t perfect, but the batteries needed time to recharge in the sunlight.

  “Alright,” Jake Wilcox mumbled, sticking his tongue out slightly as he pivoted the camera around for the best views of the immediate area. “Looks like we’re still alone, sir.”

  He flew the drone north, and then circled around toward the east for half a mile before heading south. It was roughly the same path, near the end of the drone’s frequency range, that he’d flown almost twenty times. She wondered if they should change up the pattern so their moves weren’t choreographed. Once the Germans figured out where to look, they could easily follow the drone back to the platform—

  “Ahh…wait,” Jake said
.

  “What is it?” Captain Murdock asked.

  “Looks like someone flashed the quadcopter with some type of light, like a laser pointer.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know, sir. It could be somebody trying to signal us, or it could be somebody trying to blind us. There’s no way of knowing for sure.”

  “Can you trace the point of origin for the laser?”

  He concentrated as the drone fought against winds up at the higher elevations. “This is where I was when—” The camera washed out with a series of red and green prismatic bursts.

  The light continued to dazzle the drone’s camera lens for several seconds until the lieutenant rotated it away. “That’s a defensive counter-UAV measure,” Sergeant Cheng stated from beside her. “We faced the same thing in the Ukraine back in 2016 and in Syria a few years later. It’s not very effective since the drone can just fly away from the laser, but it can temporary hide the activity in a certain location.”

  “The Germans didn’t use drones the first few days they were here,” Gloria said, thinking out loud. “They probably don’t have any defense against a technology they didn’t anticipate.”

  “Shit,” Jake mumbled, “I just got dazzled from another direction.”

  She spun on her heel, looking to where the colonel sat glumly on a bench a few feet away. “What are they doing?” she demanded.

  “It’s safe to assume that they know we have remained in the area,” the old man replied. “You are right, Miss Gloria. We examined the use of drones a decade ago and decided they were not worth the effort required to acquire the systems or the time to train on them. You must remember that our system focused on formal education, training in your assigned combat occupation, and then freezing so the next generation could use the same limited space—not to mention the difficulty in securing food supplies from our allies—not learning to use toys that have no practical application to warfare.”

  “Allies?” Gloria repeated, her eyes narrowing. It was a piece of the puzzle that she’d wondered about, but often got sidetracked trying to glean information from the old man.

  He chuckled. “You have been duped. Our allies in Argentina, who worked in conjunction with the Venezuelans for oil, supplied us with food. But our greatest ally has always been the Japanese government. They provided the raw materials for our weapons and assisted with the düsenjäger technology.”

  “No.” She was truly shocked. Not about the Venezuelans, or even the Argentinians, the Japanese though… They made it seem as if they’d given up their warlike ways, cowed into submission by the atomic bombs America had dropped. In reality, they hadn’t given up anything.

  “History lesson’s over, ma’am,” Gabe said, slipping between her and the colonel. “What are those Nazi bastards doing?” he demanded of the old man.

  “They know we remain. They are using the lasers to blind your camera so they can move troops without being observed. It’s a low-tech solution, but as I said, the use of drones—and defense against them—is not a line of effort that we spent much time developing.”

  “So, we should expect an assault?”

  “Most likely.”

  Gabe stepped away, issuing orders to his men. Gloria asked, “Did the Japanese know that you planned to attack the US?”

  “The ones I dealt with personally did. I can only speculate that the arrangement was made before the Führer left Europe.”

  Gloria sat down beside him, her mind wandering back through time to the spring of 1945. Only a delusional, schizophrenic sociopath like Adolf Hitler would believe the Germans had any hope of winning the war, or even of fighting to a stalemate at that point. In the Pacific, the Japanese had lost all of their expansionary claims except China. Tokyo was firebombed in early March, killing between seventy-five and two hundred thousand, and in April, the US landed in Okinawa, the first of the Japanese home islands. The writing was on the wall for them as well.

  The fact that the German base in Antarctica was a joint effort between the two nations should not have surprised her as much as it did. Certainly, the governments of the 1930s and 40s had collaborated somewhat before the war, but she’d always been under the impression that their communications during the war was limited due to the distances between them. That appeared to be false now.

  Several feet away, she heard Captain Murdock requesting immediate support and exfiltration. The time for tactical patience had passed; the Germans were closing in.

  “Sir, I’ve got a squad of Nazis at…four hundred meters.”

  Gloria glanced at the sniper, Sergeant Kelley, who’d whispered the warning. His spotter peered through an oddly shaped scope on a stand that allowed him to adjust it higher or lower. Corporal Hicks’ free hand unconsciously trailed the length of his own rifle, which was shorter than the sergeant’s weapon, and sported a smaller scope. Hick’s rifle resembled a traditional hunting rifle, while Kelley’s had all sorts of military enhancements that she didn’t know anything about.

  “What are they doing?” Gabe asked.

  “They’re pointing toward our position, sir,” Hicks answered.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, sir. Ah, shit…”

  “What?”

  “Their officer is looking at the metro station with binoculars.”

  “Hey, sir,” Lieutenant Wilcox called, regaining Gabe’s attention. “I’ve been flying around trying to see who was dazzling the camera. We’ve got about a hundred, hundred and fifty, Nazis inbound on our location from the north and northwest.”

  “Goddammit!” Gabe grumbled. “Sergeant Kelley, take out that squad to the south as quick as you can, then reposition to the north side.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  Corporal Hicks put his spotting scope to the side and picked up his rifle. He slid the suppressed barrel forward until the tip protruded through a small gap in the concrete wall.

  “Hicks, I’ve got the officer, you take one of the others,” Sergeant Kelley stated. “Try to find an NCO.”

  “Target identified,” Hicks replied.

  “On my mark, then weapons free.”

  “Roger.”

  “Three… Two… One.”

  Gloria jumped slightly as the muffled sound of both rifles firing nearly simultaneously startled her. Each man worked the bolt action on his weapon quickly, chambering a new round, before aiming and firing again. Their sequencing quickly became separated as the sergeant fired more rapidly than Hicks. Gloria wondered if it was the fancy rifle or experience that made Sergeant Kelley faster.

  She watched in amazement as the two snipers killed men right in front of her, snuffing out their lives before they even knew anything was happening. Part of her felt as if it weren’t fair to the Germans, while another part of her cheered that each round the men fired likely meant one less soldier trying to kill them in the next few minutes.

  Sergeant Kelley dropped the magazine on his rifle and slapped a new one home. He pushed the bolt forward and aimed again. Then it was Hicks’ turn to swap out magazines. Before either of them had cycled through their second five-round magazine, the sergeant said, “Clear.”

  They displaced to the opposite side of the platform to the second position they’d prepared and set up. Other members of the platoon occupied their previous location just a few feet from the bench where Gloria sat with the colonel.

  “Where are the hostiles, LT?” Hicks asked.

  “Bounding this way from the north,” he replied. “You should see them soon.”

  “Contact, three hundred meters!” someone yelled, forgetting about the need to remain quiet.

  “Dammit!” Gabe cursed again. “Sergeant Cheng, your men are authorized to begin firing. Do whatever you can to keep them away from the station.”

  Slowly, the men began firing at unseen targets and Gloria rushed the children over to the nonfunctioning escalator. They were surrounded on three sides by a concrete railing which provided the best possible cov
er on the platform. Down below on the first floor, men spread out, facing south to defend the station’s only entrance.

  The sounds of incoming rounds impacting against concrete, tearing through metal poles and shattering glass erupted around them as the Germans began to return fire. Within seconds, the litany of sounds was drowned out by the company commander’s shout, his voice cracking at the effort to be heard above it all.

  “Medic!”

  *****

  20 July 2025

  Holloway Office Complex, CIA Site Three, Reston, Virginia

  Berndt stretched his hands above his head languidly. He felt like he’d slept for days, but the sun shining through the window this morning told him that it had only been one complete night. He pushed his head down into the pillow, enjoying the softness. He’d never felt a bed so soft, it was comfortable beyond belief. It felt as if he were floating on a cloud.

  There was a knock on the door and a woman entered without being invited. She pushed a cart ahead of her into the center of his room. A silver dome-like object was the dominating item on the cart. Additionally, there was a silver container that resembled a tea kettle, a coffee mug, a small plate, and utensils.

  “Good morning, Oberleutnant Fischer,” she said. Her voice was soft, sounding very much like the women in the television programs he’d seen as a child.

  “Good morning,” he replied.

  “Anna,” the woman stated, lifting away the dome to reveal a massive plate of food underneath. “My name is Anna. I’ve brought you a breakfast of ham and cheese omelet, bacon, a side of oatmeal, some assorted fruits, and of course, coffee.”

  “Real coffee?” he asked. “We got a little bit of it after the initial invasion, then we pushed outside the city and it wasn’t as easy for our supply personnel to find.”

  She smiled. Her teeth were straight, and white—far whiter than anyone’s teeth in Argus Base had been. “Of course, sir. We wouldn’t think of giving you anything but the very best. After all, you’re going to be a hero.”

  The smell of the bacon made his stomach rumble. “May I?” he asked, gesturing toward the lavatory.