Like magnets to steel, Manhattan attracted every sort of low-life, criminal and soldier-for-hire. It was a place so dangerous, even The Circle had decided to leave the New Yorkers to their own devices, for the time being, at least. In fact, The Circle found it very convenient to deal with the New York power brokers—many top-shelf combat weapons systems, technologies and ammunition were bought by Viktor’s minions sent to Manhattan with bags of gold and promises of more. Not surprisingly, the city was also crawling with leftover Mid-Aks, air pirates, Family members, Russians and other representatives from “eastern” European countries.
And somewhere in the morass lay the fifth black box.
Punk 78 and Iron Man were two soldiers in the Power Systems Sector. Theirs was one of the top five largest groups in Manhattan—its territory stretched from the southeast corner of the obliterated Central Park to Park Avenue and down to the border of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. Along with the The Wheels, The Corporate Cats, Maximum Army Inc, and The House of David, Power Systems ruled the very profitable center of Manhattan. That there was a perpetual war going on between the five groups had little or no bearing on the huge profits they reaped. Battles or not, each group pulled in hundreds, if not thousands of pounds of gold and real silver each week as a result of their various gun-running, drug-pushing, protection and prostitution enterprises.
On this particular night, Punk 78 and Iron Man were serving as lookouts. They were stationed on top of a ’scraper on Madison Avenue, near East 52nd Street. Just a few blocks away, a battle royal was raging between the CorpCats and MaxArmy Inc. The two groups, deadly enemies despite their common border along the Avenue of the Americas, were blasting away at each other along adjacent buildings near the old Rockefeller Center. The flash of the artillery and the glare of rocket fire brilliantly lit up the night sky. The PSS soldiers were watching the engagement with glee. The more these two mortal enemies battered each other, all the better for Power Systems. The job of Punk 78 and Iron Man was to report the outcome of the battle to their superiors, The Chairmen, as soon as it was decided.
Iron Man was about to break open the pair’s second bottle of crack juice when something caught his eye high above the 55-story ’scraper where they were stationed.
“What the fuck was that?” he yelled to 78 over the noise of the battle a few blocks away.
Punk looked up from his infra-red NightScope. “What the fuck was what?” he yelled back, grabbing the bottle from Iron Man.
“I don’t know,” Iron Man replied. “A flash of light in the sky. Strange looking.”
“Yeh,” Punk ’78 spat out, swigging the crude cocaine-derivative liquid. “You’re the only thing that’s strange looking around here.”
The Punk turned his attention back to the Night-Scope and did a long sweep of the city. There were some heavy duty fireworks up around West 83rd Street—probably The Yankee Machine and the Zebras, two of the smaller militias, punching it out. A section of Central Park up near the lake was blazing like a forest fire. Turning east he spotted a battle between two unknown groups around the Queensboro Bridge. Looking south, the nightly pall of smoke was rising from Times Square, but nothing much was happening toward Wall Street.
No doubt the battle between the CorpCats and MaxArmy Inc. was the best show in town tonight, and Punk 78 turned back to see what he’d missed. “Jesus Christ will you look at that!” he yelled. “Those guys are using incendiary mortars, flamethrowers, .88s, the works on each other! We haven’t seen a rumble like this in months …”
He turned to get the crack juice from Iron Man, but found his companion was nowhere to be seen. In his place stood a man, dressed in black, wearing a flight helmet with the visor pulled down. He was pointing an M-16 right at the Punk’s nose.
“Hey, who the fuck are …” Punk yelled at the stranger. But before he could spit it all out, he felt the stranger’s heavy boot crash into his right cheekbone. Punk 78 went reeling across the tar-and-stone roof of the ’scraper, losing his .357 Magnum in the tumble. The stranger retrieved it, then lifted him up and forced him halfway over the edge of the building.
“Jesus! Jesus!” the Punk screamed, terrified at dropping 55 stories to the concrete pavement below.
“Listen you fucker,” the stranger said, his helmet’s closed-tight visor weirdly muffling his voice. “I ain’t got the time to fuck around with a little scum like you. Where’s this guy Calypso?”
“I don’t know no Calypso!” the Punk yelled, only to have the stranger push him even far over the edge.
“Don’t bullshit me,” the man said. “I’ll drop you so hard they’ll hear the splat all the way over in New Jerk.”
“He’ll kill me if I tell you!” Punk screamed.
“I’ll kill you if you don’t,” the stranger said, his hands tightening around the Punk’s throat.
“Okay! Okay!” Punk 78 gurgled. “I’ll tell you!”
The stranger released his grip only slightly. “Where?” he asked.
“Down at the Twins,” Punk said, tasting blood from the cracked vessels in his throat. “The WTC. The old World Trade Center. He lives down there. But you can’t get at him.”
“Why?” the stranger asked angrily.
“Because he’s high up, man,” Punk answered. “He’s higher than anyone. He sees everything. And he’s got enough firepower to knock out anything up to 14th Street. He’s got big stuff on every floor and soldiers everywhere. Don’t you understand? He’s King of Lower Manhattan. We don’t even go down there …”
The stranger let go of Punk’s throat, then knocked him sideways with a slap aside the head. The Punk hit the roof hard only to see the unconscious body of Iron Man lying 20 feet away. Somehow the stranger had taken out his partner without Punk hearing a sound.
Punk sat up and watched as the man stuffed his pockets with .357 ammunition. He took a good look at the man. “How the fuck did you get up here, man?” he asked.
The man quickly grabbed the soldier’s throat again, brought his helmet visor to within an inch of the Punk’s face and said: “I flew …”
The man they called Calypso sat on a leather couch in front of the huge window on the 110th floor of what once was the World Trade Center’s easternmost building. Before him stretched the island of Manhattan. From Wall Street to 14th Street was his. A buffer zone of allies—the Combat Lawyers, the Asbadah Holy Militia and the Laser Razors—held parcels of territory right up to Madison Square Garden and the Empire State Building. The further away from those assholes uptown, the better, Calypso always said.
He was the most powerful man in New York City. So powerful that when the Mid-Aks came to Manhattan to shop for everything from small arms to .88 artillery pieces, they came to Calypso. When the air pirates wanted to buy a couple of tons of smack, they came to Calypso. Even the Russians brought him a present every time they passed through.
And now, The Circle had asked to pay their respects, at a party Calypso would host later that night. They wanted something from him—something they knew he had. Good, he thought, watching a battle off in the distance up near Rockefeller Plaza. Because The Circle had something Calypso wanted, too.
He clapped his hands and two young girls appeared. One carried a martini pitcher filled fresh to the brim with the champagne-cocaine mix that Calypso enjoyed so much, the other an extra large NEW YORK GIANTS glass, also one of Calypso’s favorites. The shitty little wine glasses others used couldn’t quench his thirst. He wondered if these girls could. They were barely sixteen and seventeen—a present of a Soviet general who stopped by a few months ago.
He motioned one to pour him a drink and the other to stand in front of him. He was getting old, he thought as he looked at the young girl. She was blonde, small, shy, dressed per his orders as a cheerleader. He was bald, graying on the sides and fat. And perverted.
“Strip …” he said to the cheerleader, taking an enormous swig of the drug-soaked bubbly. The girl immediately obeyed, lifting off her sweater, tugging at her
socks, pulling down her skirt and revealing her pert, little breasts.
He turned the other girl and said: “You, too.” The second girl, a brunette, was dressed as a schoolgirl. She slowly removed her nylon stockings and her dress and slip, then had her companion undo the snap on her bra.
“Come, sit with me,” he said, taking the two naked girls on to the couch with him. “Drink, drink up, girls and get me in a good mood. I have a party to do tonight.”
He was getting old, he thought, as he casually fondled the young girls’ bodies. He was getting sick of this kid’s stuff. His friends and “business associates,” knowing his taste in “developing” women, were always dropping off two or three young ones, just to keep in his good graces. But although it was tough to admit it, he now realized he needed maturity in his playthings. He wanted something unattainable.
That’s why he was especially looking forward to meeting Viktor …
The submarine surfaced just off Coney Island. From here, it would ride quietly on the dark surface of the water right through Lower Bay off Brooklyn, up The Narrows and into the Upper Bay off the southern tip of Manhattan. The trip would take less than a half hour; there would still be a good four hours of night left when it arrived at its destination near Liberty Island.
The five men crowded in the sub’s conning tower all wore black combat fatigues. Their faces had been charcoaled, as were their hands. Each man carried a silencer-equipped M-14 rifle. The sub’s captain managed to squeeze his way up through them and quickly went over their coordinates one last time. Their pickup point would be Ellis Island, the rendezvous time exactly three hours and 10 minutes after the time they left the boat. Miss the time or the location, same thing 24 hours later. Miss it again, and they would be on their own.
The submarine was from Free Canada; four of the charcoaled soldiers were Free Canadian commandos. The other was an American—an intelligence agent from Mike Fitzgerald’s Syracuse Aerodrome. The tiny group had planned and trained extensively for this mission for the past two weeks. Now that D-Day had come and the tides were finally running right for them, they were anxious to get on with it.
The sub slowed to a halt just off Liberty Island. The captain called down a warning to his steering crew that the massive severed head of the Liberty Statue sat in ten feet of dirty water right off the sub’s bow. The sub obediently backed-up for 20 feet then steered around toward deeper water.
The captain wished the men good luck as they scrambled down the tower’s ladder and into a large rubber raft they had inflated. The captain looked up at the full moon. Smoke from a fire way uptown was drifting in front of it, giving everything struck by moonbeams a dark orange tinge. It took five brave men to go into that city alone, the captain thought as the men paddled away. He hoped they were being well-paid.
The Lincoln Continental gun wagon roared through the abandoned intersection of West 41st Street and Broadway. The noise of the relentless explosions coming from the CorpCats and MaxArmy Inc. battle six blocks back, drowned out the car’s own, muffler-free racket. Inside the car sat five soldiers plus a tail gunner. The powerful beams of the six modified headlights provided a path of light through the darkened streets. The gunmen were from The House of David; every man wore gray camouflage fatigues, long shoulder-length hair and a beard. Their squad commander—a former Israeli Army lieutenant—sat behind the wheel, careening the big car through a routine patrol of the southern edge of their territory.
If there was a moderate force in New York City, it was the House of David. They were into diamonds—buying them, selling them. Most of their members were former Israeli soldiers who headed for America after parts of the Middle East were obliterated during the war. Through their leadership, the House Army was tough, well-trained and very dangerous in a fight. Although the smallest of the big league groups, no one on the island wanted to tangle with the House if they could at all avoid it.
The Lincoln screamed around the corner of West 38th Street and turned onto Eighth Avenue. That’s when they saw the bodies. The squad commander—a young man called Zack Wack—stood on the brakes as his troopers readied their weapons. The car screeched to a halt and the five soldiers leaped out and assumed defensive positions. The rear gunner, working a M60 heavy machinegun out of a small turret placed where the car’s trunk used to be, covered their tails. The men watched and waited.
Slowly, Wack moved forward. The heavily-littered avenue was completely deserted except for the eight bodies that were lying in the middle of the block. Wack didn’t like the looks of it. It appeared the men had been ambushed. But if that was the case, it must have been a quick fight. All eight men went quickly, even before they were able to get to cover. Either that or someone had lured them out into the open.
He reached the first body and pulled the man over. Wack thought it might have been a soldier from Adzubah—the House of David’s mortal enemy—but he knew right away this was not the case. This man was Nordic and new in town; his uniform was still creased and his hands were clean. He carried no papers but Wack knew right away what the man’s nationality was. He could tell by his boots. Only one army in the world issued black leather ankle-boots as standard equipment. The man was a Russian soldier.
Wack knew that Russian soldiers sometimes passed through New York, but this was the first one he’d seen up close.
He moved on to the next man, then the next. It appeared as if each was wearing a .357 Magnum bullet wound somewhere on his head or neck. Strange, Wack thought. It was as if they’d all been shot from above …
Chapter Twenty-four
THE WIND WAS COLD and blustery at the tip of Manhattan. Despite the spring season, the four Calypso sentries were bundled up in their winter gear, standard equipment for anyone pulling duty outside and on top of Calypso’s WT buildings. It galled them that while four squads of Calypso’s personal security guards lounged around in comfort inside one floor below them, they, being lowly grunts in Calypso’s street army, had to freeze their asses off, sitting 112 stories high, exposed to the elements and watching for God-knows-what.
The men sat huddled around five cans of Sterno and killed time by rolling dice. All they had to drink was a bottle of Harlem Juice—powerful, but terrible stuff. Downstairs, inside the once famous restaurant called Windows of the World, they knew the security guards were taking turns on the two young things Calypso just used …
“But do we see any of that stuff way the fuck up here?” one of the men grumbled.
“No fucking way,” another answered.
“And that asshole Calypso give them to those pansy security guys,” a third said, taking a swig of the Harlem Juice. “You know, what’s the big fucking occasion that he’s treating those shitheads so good?”
A fourth man—the group’s sergeant and leader—grabbed the bottle and said: “No wonder you guys are all asshole privates. Don’t you know what’s going on here tonight?”
The three soldiers shook their heads.
“You ever hear of this guy Viktor? The leader of the whole fucking Circle? He’s coming here. Tonight,” the sergeant said.
“Here?” one of the men said. “You got to be shittin’ us.”
The sergeant took another long, slow swig and wiped his mouth. “What the fuck do you think all these heavyweights are here for?” he said. “The place is triple-decked with security guards and the whole Goddamn Battery company stationed up here tonight.”
“They are?” a soldier asked. “Then who the fuck’s watching the Battery?”
“Who the fuck cares?” the sergeant drunkenly screamed at the man. “This place is crawling with celebrities. Not like those assholes up town. I mean big shots. Top Mid-Ak guys. Air pirates. I hear some Family guys are in town. Even a bunch of Russians. They’re all here to see this Viktor guy.”
“Well just as long as Calypso don’t volunteer us to go fight out in the ’Bads,” one man said. “That’s the baddest shit that’s going down today, brother. I mean, they was recruiting up in Time
s Square three months ago. These dudes is signing up like they’d never seen a new suit of clothes before. They just say: Gimme the gun. Gimme the gun. These guys are dedicated, you understand? But they go out to the Badlands, I say half of them don’t make it back.”
“None of them make it back,” another soldier said, spitting out some impurity his teeth caught in the Harlem Juice. “There’s some bad ass flyboys out on the coast. And that’s who they is fighting out west. And you don’t never want to fool with these jet fighter guys. I mean, these guys are fast and they can drop some very big bombs on your ass. I know, I was there when The Family tried to take Football City. These fucking Free Forces guys in their airplanes kill about half the Family guys before they even cross the fucking river. Then, when they do get across, the Football City guys run back into this big motherfucker stadium and this dude Hunter—the famous guy—he calls in a B-52 strike! And when the dust cleared, there ain’t no Family no more. They’re ain’t even a fucking city left!”
“Fuck it man,” the sergeant said. “This guy Viktor is clutch. If anyone can bump off those jets, it’s The Circle. They say he even bought off the Russians to sneak in every fucking SAM they had left. You can’t fly over the Badlands any more. Fucking Russians will shoot you down.”
“They say he’s got a bunch of Chinamen riding around on horses out there, too,” another said.
“You bet your ass,” the sergeant said, grabbing the bottle again. “And he’s got a huge motherfucking army. So it’s all these people and rockets and cavalry and things against a bunch of jets fighters and about six divisions. Circle will kick their ass!”
The sergeant took the bottle, wiped the top and put it to his lips. He took a gulp and in doing so, raised his eyes to look directly at the full moon above him.
Circle War Page 18