Battle for America

by Maloney, Mack;

  Of all people, why would the girlfriend of the famous, if departed, Hawk Hunter be welcoming him to New York City? He was completely stumped, not the natural state of affairs for him.

  Once out of earshot, he asked her incredulously, “Why are you here? Why would you do such a thing?”

  Her answer stunned him.

  “I wanted to meet you,” she said simply. “I’m attracted to powerful men.”

  They began living together immediately, mostly in the apartment in the sky.

  While he spent his day approving things like a pilot genocide program on the city’s homeless, trial runs for hugely expanded NKVD operations in the near future, or a law that would tax all of New York’s civilians for essentials like food and water, she’d passed the time dressing up in slinky outfits and wandering about the penthouse, poking into things here and there, reading anything interesting left lying about.

  Many times at night, though, if he could skip out on his official duties, they’d stay at a suite he’d arranged for her at the old Ritz-Carlton on Central Park South, where it was much more peaceful. Plus, the place gave him plausible deniability should the Kremlin deem it unfit for the toughest guy in the world to be living with a girl he’d just met. Dominique was funny and smart and hip and sexy. They would stay up nights on end just talking or watching some of his homemade porn. She teased him unmercifully—and faithfully reminded him to take his meds.

  It was a strange romance, though. As monstrous as ever in his day job, he had calmed down in his personal life. He hadn’t thrown any of his drunken, murderous parties in New York, at least not so far. And although his terrarium had been set up, it had not been used yet. He’d told his top people, including the members of CRPP, that he would not tolerate any acts of sexual brutality anywhere—until further notice.

  His personal appearance had also improved. Now his hair was always combed, his posture had straightened up overnight, and he shaved just once every three days. This was all Dominique’s doing. She was helping him turn it up a notch, and he liked it. It made him feel even more powerful.

  Soon after that fateful night at the docks, he told one of his former mistresses, a member of the Cutie squad, that by getting Dominique, he felt that the last piece of a very big puzzle had finally fallen into place.

  Then came the navy penthouse incident two nights before. Three medical officers had been on hand, and they had diagnosed her sudden lightheadedness and dizziness as a result of a lack of sleep or a potassium deficiency.

  But he knew it was neither of these things. In reality, she had swooned because she’d experienced both an emotional and physical fright in the instant she saw the plane’s pilot.

  Literally, as if she’d seen a ghost.

  Last night, they’d watched the battle with the ghost plane from their bedroom window atop 30 Rock. Or at least Zmeya had.

  His security people wanted to evacuate them at the beginning of the craziness, either by helicopter or ground transport, but Zmeya had refused to leave. He’d also refused to let anyone else leave the building. He’d wanted to see it all up close, and so should they.

  He’d shouted encouragement first to the Yaks, then the Brozis, and finally, for a few seconds, to the SA-2 SAM missile. But when it obliterated Chelsea Piers, the worst luck possible for the Okupatsi, he began to boil, throwing things and cursing.

  Dominique had covered her eyes during the whole thing. Even when he demanded that she watch the ghost plane’s pilot get what was coming to him, she’d refused. And when he’d asked her why she acted so odd when the bug plane was flying around and was it because her old paramour was behind the controls, she’d shot back that her old boyfriend had died long ago and he was cruel to bring it up. But he didn’t believe her, and at that moment, it had made him even more furious. The instant he’d seen Chelsea Piers blow up, he’d grabbed her by the arm and locked her and himself inside the penthouse’s windowless, heavily armored safe room. He’d raged for two hours until she’d finally convinced him to take his medication.

  Up to that point, this had been the most enjoyable month of Zmeya’s life.

  Now, he poured himself a glass of mineral water from the nightstand.

  He could hear a party starting up with the members of CRPP and their Dominique look-alikes one floor below. Despite the disaster the night before, there were small bashes going on all across the city, military officers celebrating the demise of the ghost plane.

  Though the army people were proudly trumpeting that one of their own had shot down the aerial pest, Zmeya was too smart to believe it. He always insisted on seeing the corpse before declaring an adversary dead.

  No, the ghost plane was still out there. He could feel it. And he no longer had any doubt who was at the controls. The goddamn Wingman. He was sure of it after the other night. The way the bug was flying, its amazing aerial stunts, and especially Dominique’s reaction said it all. And while enemies were useful because failures could always be blamed on them, Zmeya wished with all his dark heart that Hawk Hunter would just stay dead.

  He looked down on the city and sighed. His city, as he liked to think of it. Heavily damaged the night before but solely by self-inflicted wounds. The question was: Where would they go from here?

  When he turned back again, Dominique was sitting on the edge of the bed, staring at him.

  She was wrapped only in a towel, and a small one at that. Her skin was still glistening from her bath. The edges of her hair were wet and curling, a hairdo he’d never seen on her before. It reignited his lust.

  “You’re amazingly quiet,” he told her. “You’d make a good spy.”

  “How many women have met their end on a bed like this with you?” she asked in her lightly French-accented voice.

  He shrugged. “Seven?”

  “Is that all?” she said, drying her hair with a second towel. “I expected more.”

  He reached out and tried to grab her, but she inched just far enough away to be out of his reach.

  “Have sex with me,” he said in a faux-stern tone. Another odd facet of their relationship was that they’d yet to engage in full relations.

  “Why?” she asked. “So I can be number eight?”

  “But isn’t that alone enough to excite you? The ecstasy of it? Not knowing …”

  “If I’ll ever see the sunrise?” she finished his sentence for him. “Maybe if I were a vampire.”

  “You didn’t know what was going to happen that night down at the dock,” he told her.

  She drew closer and ran her fingers gently down his chest, stopping just above his crotch.

  “Of course I did,” she cooed.

  Zmeya knew he was incapable of loving another human being—he’d been diagnosed as such. But the closest he’d come so far was with this woman.

  “You said you liked powerful men,” he insisted. “And I’m a powerful man. … And I’m a hero to some, too. I know you like that. …”

  That was another thing. Trust her or not, on a carnal level, Dominique’s once having been the Wingman’s girlfriend was the pinnacle of excitement for him.

  “Tell me now,” he asked her, not for the first time. “How do you think I’d compare to your famous Wingman?”

  She coyly deflected the question with a question of her own. “Why? Do you wish I were someone else?”

  Her being coquettish about it was another turn-on. But the fact that the CRPP members had sent out a picture of the real Dominique in order to get girlfriends who were clones of her spoke volumes.

  “Have sex with me,” he said, trying again. “Please …”

  “Not yet,” she said with a laugh, throwing her hair towel at him.

  Those damn two words. He hated them.

  “Why make me wait another moment?” he beseeched her.

  “So you’ll enjoy it more when it comes,” she said. “I p
lan to teach you the tantric way of doing things. The more time you take, the better it is.”

  She put on a long T-shirt and nothing more.

  Zmeya sat up on the bed, narrowing his eyes. “I could make you do it. Right here, right now.”

  She just laughed at him again. “If you need something right here, right now, then you’d better do it yourself.”

  He flopped back down on the pillows, foiled again.

  A moment later, 30 Rock began shaking.

  The tremors were so powerful that Zmeya fell clear off the bed. Dominique immediately went to her knees and crawled into the corner. At the same moment, an incredibly bright flash of light lit up all of southern Manhattan. Then came an earsplitting roar. Dominique braced herself, blocking her ears. It was like the building was about to topple over.

  “Do you have nukes with you?” she called across the room to him. It was a strange question.

  Then, just as quickly, the shaking stopped.

  Zmeya got to his feet and ran to the window. He saw a massive tongue of flame shooting up from the South Street Seaport area. Not a nuke, but a very large conventional explosion.

  “The fuel ship,” he called to her over his shoulder. “The Boleska—it just blew up.”

  There was a large red suitcase at the foot of their bed; something inside began beeping. Zmeya hurried over to it, undid the locks, and opened it. Inside was a special NKVD radiophone; it could talk only to other NKVD radiophones and was designed to be eavesdrop-proof.

  Zmeya picked up the handset and extended the antenna. A readout on the radio’s dial told him someone was calling him from his security room, where the party had just started downstairs.

  “What have those navy fools done now?” he shouted into the phone.

  For the Russian sailors serving aboard the air barge docked near the South Street Seaport, it was supposed to have been a quiet night.

  Red Radio had promised as much. Just before evening chow was delivered, an army spokesman had made a special broadcast, speaking first in Russian and then in English.

  While the entirety of Chelsea Piers had been destroyed by the crash of the wayward SA-4 SAM missile, the good news was that the ghost plane, the cause of it all, had been shot down by an army colonel named Samsonov.

  The weird little aircraft was gone for good; peace had been restored.

  The first indication that it wasn’t going to be a peaceful night for the sailors came just before midnight.

  The sun had set long ago, but the East River’s waterfront was lit up, as was most of the Manhattan skyline. The Yak barge crew was relaxing out on their floating tarmac, their two VTOL fighter planes tied down nearby, when they suddenly heard a combination of unmistakable sounds.

  The loud raspy engine, the whining propeller, an eerie whistling on the wind …

  It was the ghost plane. True to its name, it was back from the dead.

  The plane was flying very fast and very low across the East River, coming right at them from over Brooklyn. Before they realized what was happening, the little circus plane had gone over their heads, giant wheels and all.

  They heard its engine screech; its nose went nearly straight up—and suddenly the plane was hovering in midair. Not over the Yaks’ air barge, but over the vessel docked next to it, the fuel ship, Boleska. …

  They saw the cockpit window get pulled back and the pilot drop a small package down the Boleska’s smoke stack. Then the strange little plane dropped back down to level flight and shot away like a bullet.

  The air barge crew were all veterans of the recent war in Europe. They all knew what was going to happen next. They immediately jumped off the barge into the chilly waters of the East River.

  The Boleska blew up two seconds later.

  By dropping an explosive device down the fuel ship’s stack, the ghost pilot had ignited forty thousand gallons of highly volatile aviation gasoline below. The resulting blast was tremendous. Those barge crew members in the river found themselves being forced back down into the water by the explosion.

  When the survivors finally struggled to the surface, all they saw was fire and billowing smoke. The Boleska was gone—blown to bits—and their barge was gone, too, along with the two Yaks and about half of the old South Street Seaport.

  Just like that, the Okupatsi had no more air force.

  The name of the East Village club was Buckskins, and the Sostva’s security detail came busting through its door ten minutes before the Boleska blew up.

  As these security troops took up positions at every exit, cutting off all means of escape, an army lieutenant walked past the startled customers and the club’s small stage and approached the bartender.

  “Is there a show here tonight?” the officer asked. “You are making cabaret?”

  “First act is on in five minutes,” the bartender replied, “if that’s what you mean. …”

  “Make this place empty,” the officer told him.

  The bartender began to protest, but looked at the thirty or so armed soldiers standing about and thought better of it.

  “We’re closing early!” he yelled to a couple dozen customers. “We just got booked for a private party.”

  No one protested, and the place quickly cleared out.

  The army officer then gave a signal to a sergeant at the front door, who in turn signaled someone out in the street. A dozen more soldiers trooped in, and behind them, the three commanders of the Sostva.

  Alexei, Kartunov, and Marshal MOP scanned the place and declared it suitable. All but a dozen of the security troops quickly left the club, taking up secondary positions out on the street. The high commanders took the first three seats in front of the small stage and began clapping their hands. Their personal aides rushed to get several bottles of vodka from behind the bar, ordering the bartender not to interfere.

  Drinks in hand, the commanders commenced stomping their feet. The bartender flicked a switch, the stage curtain opened, and four scantily clad, heavily made-up dancers appeared. They all had red hair and were wearing high heels. A cassette tape started playing and the dancers broke into a Roaring Twenties Charleston.

  The Sostva officers were immediately entranced, draining their drinks and stomping their feet as the dancers twisted and twirled even closer to them. The first performance took only three minutes, and at its end, the commanders all jumped to their feet, applauding madly.

  The roar of the huge explosion came a moment later.

  The floor of the club partially collapsed. Bottles and glasses broke behind the bar. Ceiling tiles rained down on everyone inside. Smoke began filling the place.

  The twelve security men rushed to the three commanders and literally carried them out to the street.

  Something was desperately wrong; the whole eastern sky was lit up. But in the narrow confines of the East Village, it was hard for anyone to determine exactly what had happened. The security troops had their radios crackling, shouting questions into them as other troops formed a phalanx around the Sostva officers, who were still retreating under the club’s marquee.

  That’s when air raid sirens started up all over Lower Manhattan. Everyone’s eyes naturally turned skyward to see a formation of five aircraft go overhead, flying very low. Four of the planes looked large and bulky; the fifth was about one tenth their size.

  “Four flying elephants and a flea?” Admiral Kartunov said, trying to make some sense of it. “Those aren’t ours, are they?”

  Air-raid alarms were soon blaring all over the city.

  They were attached to the Russian SAM launch systems. All the SAM batteries had air-defense radars as part of their control suites. When these radars picked up four blips flying in from the direction of New Jersey, their automated systems first checked to see if the incoming aircraft were sending out a Russian IFF identification signal, indicating friend or foe. W
hen the SAM stations received no signal at all, their sirens went off automatically, causing immediate confusion in the streets of Russkiy-NYC.

  The four Sherpas had flown up the East River from the direction of Governors Island, skirting Lower Manhattan. After Hunter put the clown plane into a screaming climb and joined them to provide cover, the formation banked west over the old United Nations Building and reduced speed. Many people on the East Side and in Midtown could see them clearly now. Even though it was dark, they were flying so low and slow that they were hard to miss.

  This was especially true for people doing night duty inside the skyscrapers at the MMZ, which was in the process of coming back to life after the previous night’s chaos. All two dozen skyscrapers inside the Russian Zone had their power back on, and small armies of MOP crews were just finishing cleaning up broken glass and patching windows with huge sheets of plywood.

  Meanwhile, 30 Rock had been only slightly damaged during the confusing battle. The big red star atop it was still blazing away at full power.

  This was good—because it served as a perfect beacon for the oncoming 7CAV aircraft.

  The Sherpas broke out of their V formation over Third Avenue and East Forty-Seventh Street, re-forming into a straight line heading directly toward the MMZ. Holding at exactly three thousand feet, the lead airplane reached a point precisely ten seconds away from passing over the Russian Army’s cookie-cutter headquarters, and barrels came tumbling out of its open rear-bay door. Gravity and forward motion did the rest. The barrels slammed against the skyscraper’s north side like a vertical string of eggs.

  Each one exploded with a burst of blue and yellow flame. In the next instant, those flames were literally splashing all over the top floors of the building, a tremendous boom coming with each impact.

  The next plane in line mimicked the first plane’s actions, just on a slightly different time line. Its string of barrel bombs hit the navy headquarters’ broadside. There was another series of blue-yellow explosions, another tremendous wave of fire splashing against the side of the building, another cannonade of deafening booms!