Battle for America

by Maloney, Mack;

  His radiophone rang, breaking his train of thought. He hoped at long last it was a report on the fate of the Isakov. But it was Sublieutenant Borski instead.

  “Two things to report, sir,” he told Zmeya, who could barely stand talking to the disfigured man even on the phone. “We found the American guerilla air base in the Pine Barrens where you said it would be. We left them a message.”

  Zmeya brightened up. Finally. “How many were there?”

  Borski hesitated a moment. “About two dozen, sir. Americans for sure. The base looked like it could support about a hundred people and a few medium-size aircraft.”

  Another piece of the puzzle suddenly fell in place for Zmeya. The planes that had attacked the Isakov were medium-size. Plus, there was a good chance the firebombing raid had been launched from the hidden New Jersey base as well.

  “Where is the rest of their group?” he asked. “Are there eighty guerillas unaccounted for?”

  “That’s unknown at the moment,” Borski replied. “My guess is they heard us coming and hid in the woods. As the army missile bombardment followed us in, they could all be dead by now.”

  Zmeya made a note to send a battalion of Chekskis into the Pine Barrens immediately. Their mission: to look for any survivors and execute them all.

  Then he asked Borski, “What is your second report?”

  “Per your request, sir,” Borski said excitedly, “we are holding two thousand people at Yankee Stadium. I’m awaiting your final orders.”

  “Have any of them come forward with information on who these American guerillas are?”

  “That’s negative, sir.”

  “Or where they are getting their support?”

  “Again, negative, sir.”

  “Have they dug their own graves?”

  Borski nodded. “They have.”

  “And have you come up with a more economical way of processing them? Something better than one bullet per person?”

  “I have, sir.”

  “You’re sure? You have everything covered, correct?”

  “Yes, sir,” Borski replied. With his next words, Zmeya would, in effect, be telling him to use knives to kill the hostages. It was Borski’s favorite means of dispatching human beings.

  Zmeya was about to say, “Then make it so. …” when he noticed Dominique standing next to him. She had stolen up on him again, making no noise at all.

  She was barefoot, wearing only a stunning short black negligee he’d given her when things were still good between them. Her hair was fixed and she was wearing makeup. If possible, she looked even more ravishing than usual.

  “Let’s do it,” she said to him.

  “Do what?”

  She ran her fingers down his chest.

  “Guess.”

  It dawned on him an instant later. But he was more mystified than excited at first.

  “Why now?” he asked, his hand blocking the phone’s mouthpiece so Borski couldn’t hear.

  “I just thought I could get your mind on something else,” she said, looking him deeply in the eyes.

  That also took a couple seconds to sink in. He pointed at the phone. “This? You want me to stop this thing at the stadium?”

  She came very close to him and said, “I want to make a deal with you.”

  “Spare them, and you’ll have sex with me?” he asked.

  She nodded and moved in even closer; she was practically on his lap.

  He just laughed. “My God, I’ve been living with a humanitarian all this time,” he said, mocking her. “Sometimes you just can’t tell.”

  “This is how you say yes?” she scolded him. “After all your begging?”

  He pretended to yawn. “How do I know it would be worth it? Or exciting enough?”

  She didn’t say anything. Instead, he felt something touching his crotch—a familiar feeling. He looked down to see she had her huge hunter’s knife out again and was using it to softly jab his manhood.

  It had happened before, but this time, her eyes told him it would go a different way if he didn’t play along.

  “Do it my way,” she whispered. “Do it exactly how I tell you, and I guarantee, you’ll never want to do it any other way again.

  She pushed the knife in just a little deeper. Zmeya was suddenly more excited than at any time in his life.

  He removed his hand from the phone’s mouthpiece and calmly said to Borski, “Postpone the executions—until you hear from me.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  May 9

  Twelve people were sitting around the conference table inside the Isakov’s combat center.

  The room was a mess, just like everything else on the carrier where there’d been heavy fighting. But it was spacious and its table was still intact and large enough for all of them to fit. And no one was fussy.

  Old friends and allies all, Hunter was sitting next to Jim Cook of JAWS and Frank Geraci of NJ104. The Cobra Brothers were to Geraci’s left. Next to them sat the famous Captain Crunch. Beside him, Hunter’s close friends, JT and Ben Wa, then Catfish Johnson and Colonel Donnie Kurjan of the United American Army. Across from Hunter was his old friend Louie St. Louis, mayor of Football City and CO of the famous Football City Special Forces. Beside him was Bull Dozer. They were all drinking no-name whiskey.

  The meeting started with a ceremony for the twenty civilians and five 7CAV guys murdered in the Pine Barrens. Making it worse, eight 7CAV guys had been killed during the carrier fight.

  Dozer led the service, but he could barely speak. More than 10 percent of his men had been killed in the last forty-eight hours. For a group of only one hundred, it was a devastating blow. Just as bad were the twenty dead civilians executed at the hidden base. He felt responsible for the loss of those men’s lives and how it was going to affect their families.

  This was why, when the service was over and the meeting began, Dozer had the floor.

  “I’ll keep it short,” he said, still struggling to keep his composure. “I’m glad we all finally got together, but now we must be reasonable. Even if we raise our numbers to two thousand fighters, we still won’t have a chance against the sixty-five thousand Russian troops in the city.

  “However, I think it would be a worthy objective to destroy those NKVD devils inside New York. As for me, I want every last one of them dead. The world would be a better place without them.”

  He took a moment and cleared his throat.

  “I’m talking about some kind of raid on Tower Two inside the World Trade Center,” he went on. “We know through the 616 that’s where they are, and we have all this new weaponry now. We can take out a lot of these guys if we can hit that building by surprise. It won’t win us back the city, but it will show all those freaks in the Kremlin that we’re not going away—we burned your MMZ, we captured your boat, and now we’re going to fuck up your secret cops.

  “In other words, we can all get killed fighting thirty-five-to-one odds, or we can take on these monsters, wipe them off the face of the earth, and have our revenge. Or at least I will.”

  There was no vote. They didn’t need one.

  As St. Louis said, “It is a noble cause. They don’t come along every day.”

  So it was agreed. They would attack the NKVD headquarters in Lower Manhattan and try to kill as many of the secret policemen as they could.

  But it wouldn’t be easy.

  Tower Two had been built to accommodate about ten thousand people. From Dozer’s snooping, they knew there were now at least two thousand Militsiya inside, along with many administrative NKVD people, including computer operators. Plus, nearly all of the Chekskis were now guarding a huge perimeter around the two towers. This meant they would be up against at least five thousand of the psycho enemy fighters before they even got to the front door.

  Even if the All
ies were somehow able to battle their way through these Chekskis and get inside the 110-story building, they’d still have to fight their way to the top. That would be a long, bloody haul.

  Just getting a substantial fighting force into Lower Manhattan seemed impossible. NJ104’s Frank Geraci was a wizard at logistics. Moving troops around and getting them where they had to be was one of his talents.

  But this was a real stumper for him.

  “We could go over to Lower Manhattan in boats from the New Jersey side,” he explained, “but that would be highly dangerous. Or we can somehow get up in far north Manhattan, right after their barbed wire and checkpoints end and just rush the gate. Then we’d have to do a Mad Mile the whole length of the fucking island—which would actually be thirteen Mad Miles in a row. But either way, we’d need transport, and that would mean those resurrected buses and cabs of theirs. But just our luck, they keep them all down in the Staten Island Ferry parking lot … in Lower Manhattan. We can’t assume we could take over enough of some other kind of transport, like random cars or whatever, to get us all into the fight at the same time. And, let’s face it, we can’t walk it.”

  “Plus we’ve got to get it done before the remainder of Convoy 56 arrives,” Crunch pointed out. “Wherever they are.”

  The newly arrived Allies had a hard time believing the story about the convoy. Hunter and Dozer and the rest of the 7CAV couldn’t believe it themselves. Hunter had KO’d the Chekski troop ship and one battle cruiser plus the flock of Su-34s. And they’d seized the Isakov, devastated as it was, and made it move the twenty-six miles to Nantucket, and here they were.

  But they still couldn’t explain why the second battle cruiser had sunk. Everyone who’d been on deck and seen it said the same thing: The second battle cruiser had been about to fire a killer barrage at the Isakov when it suddenly blew up and disappeared beneath the waves, all in the blink of an eye.

  Later on, someone had suggested the huge ship might have been nuclear-powered, and the reactor had exploded just as the ship had been about to blast 7CAV off the deck.

  “Most convenient timing in any universe,” Dozer mused in response to that theory.

  But that still left the five destroyers unaccounted for, and they were all equipped with Styx missiles, which could really fuck up your day. Did they run into really bad weather? Did they turn back? No one knew.

  Hunter remained quiet during the meeting. He listened to the theories, the plans, the complications. The odds. But he noticed no one in the room uttered one word of complaint or gave any indication of shirking off a mission that would likely get them killed. That aspect just wasn’t part of the conversation. This was their country. The United States of America.

  Their motto: Get Mad—then Get Even.

  Finally, though, they all looked to him. He was the Wingman, their leader. There had never been a ceremony making it official, but then again, there’d never been a need for one.

  He was the recognized expert because every plan he’d come up with in the past had somehow worked. It was his turn to play superhero again.

  He drained the last of his whiskey, then said, “Okay—we might be able to do it like this: We can cross the river way up in Harlem, but maybe we don’t need buses or cabs. And maybe we won’t have to do thirteen Hell miles in a row just to get down to the WTC.”

  He continued to speak for twenty minutes, off the cuff, but with lots of detail. When he finished, they were all in agreement. Considering the situation, and the hundreds of risks, especially since they’d be outnumbered more than thirty to one, the men pronounced the plan brilliant.

  Now Hunter just had to make it work.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  May 10

  Ivan Samsonov looked out the only window in his new office at the Liberty Court building in Lower Manhattan. It was still raining.

  The weather had been wet and gloomy for the past twenty-four hours. Downpours nonstop, giant raindrops, like a million tears, rolling down his windowpane. He wondered how things were back in Petrograd. Was it sunny there?

  The rain clouds had a silver lining, though. The fires in Midtown and southern Manhattan were finally going out.

  Samsonov had been a hero for exactly one day. He was the guy who shot down the ghost plane. Not entirely accurate, but what did details matter. Praised by the Sostva, idolized on Red Radio, promised the People’s Medal of Courage by the NKVD, his name had been on everyone’s lips.

  Until … the little clown plane showed up again the next night, sank the Yak barge and its fuel ship, and was spotted in the sky during the firebombing of the MMZ. After that, Samsonov’s celebrity status went up in smoke quicker than the drug pens on Chelsea Piers. Red Radio stopped talking about him, the Sostva stopped reading his reports, and he never did get that medal. He was still worried that the NKVD was going to knock on his door at any minute and take him for a ride to the Staten Island landfill.

  In the middle of it all, the army had transferred what was left of its staff people to the new headquarters down near Battery Park. Samsonov’s office was on the top floor, and it included a tiny studio apartment. But it was nowhere near as luxurious as his old office in the immolated Army Building. It was cramped, and that single window looked out not on panoramic Manhattan, but on the smoky, greasy, trash-strewn communal canteen next door and the dreary navy ships in the harbor beyond.

  Just a few days ago, the Russian military in America had commanded four mighty skyscrapers.

  Now they had this second-rate twenty-story high rise, while the NKVD was suddenly in the tallest building in the world.

  Nothing about his job had changed.

  Security was in place around the new headquarters, and Samsonov still made rounds and still had to read and sign mountains of paperwork. The famously glacial Russian bureaucracy hadn’t sped up just because the MMZ was now a smoldering hole in the ground. With the whole system in disarray, if anything, it would probably get worse.

  It was 5:00 a.m. and he’d been working in his apartment, which contained a foldout couch, a personal desk, a dresser, and not much more. He’d fallen asleep on his couch, surrounded by piles of things he had to sign, when there was a knock at his door.

  His heart immediately went to his throat. He took his LPG-3 pistol from his desk and opened the door. Two unsmiling Militsiya walked in, wearing their signature black hats and coats and dark glasses.

  “You are Colonel Ivan Samsonov Mikalovich?” one asked as the other took the pistol from him.

  “I am,” Samsonov replied, just about losing it.

  The first man reached into his interior coat pocket and pulled out not a gun, but a red-striped pouch.

  He handed it to Samsonov, and both men left without another word.

  Samsonov’s hands were shaking so badly he could barely hold the pouch, let alone open it. But inside there were no pictures of naked women, but a note from the new NKVD HQ at the World Trade Center, signed by Commissar Zmeya himself.

  It read: “You have been promoted to Supreme Commander of all Okupatsi forces in Russkiy-NYC. Report to my office immediately.”

  Samsonov ran in the rain.

  There was no army transport available for him, and it was impossible to find one of the yellow cabs that were supposed to be providing rides for military officers.

  But he didn’t care. His head was spinning, his body still trembling. What was this all about? For his own sanity, he had to find out. It was just eight blocks to the WTC, so he’d thrown a trash bag over his head and sprinted down the wet and dirty streets.

  He literally ran into a Chekski checkpoint five blocks out from the Twin Towers, which were hard to see in the rain and fog. He hated the Chekskis, hated having anything to do with them. Though they wore policemen’s uniforms, they were always unwashed and unshaven and many of them went barefoot. The guys manning this checkpoint were no diff
erent. Madmen with AK-47s who gave everyone a hard time and seemed ready to fly off the handle at any moment.

  He showed them the note from Zmeya, basically a writ of free passage anywhere in the city. But still, they delayed letting him through until everyone at the checkpoint—seven gunmen in all—had read the missive, discussed it, checked his personal papers, and then read the note again, all while keeping him waiting in the rain.

  Once through, he began running again, only to encounter another Chekski checkpoint not a half block away. Eventually let through, he was stopped at a third checkpoint just a half block away from that. Across from him was Greenwich Street. It went for quite a way in both directions and he saw dozens of Chekski checkpoints and clusters of men and equipment set up practically on top of one another. Thousands of Chekskis had been ordered to security duty in the area.

  He had to pass through seven more security checkpoints before reaching the entryway to Tower Two, where it only got worse.

  As soon as he walked through the main doors of Tower Two, Samsonov felt really disturbing vibes. Every NKVD person he saw—officers, guards, apparatchiks—was not only busy, but in panic mode, desperately busy.

  He could tell something had gone terribly wrong for the NKVD. He’d been in the Russian military for almost fifteen years. He knew what the shit drill looked like. But he could only wonder what it was, beyond the firebombing of Midtown.

  He got rid of the trash bag and tried to shake the water out of his uniform and hair. The first interior checkpoint was near the elevators. It was guarded by the Milashkis, Zmeya’s sexy, all-female, inner-sanctum protection squad. The last time Samsonov had seen the Cuties, he’d been smuggling an RPG launcher into 30 Rock. Now he had a letter signed by the commissar himself.

  “I am glad to see you and not the Chekskis in here,” he said as they were letting him pass.

  “The Chekskis are not allowed within a quarter-mile perimeter of the commissar’s headquarters,” a Cutie replied.

  Samsonov was in the building security business; he knew how to guard a skyscraper. A quarter-mile perimeter would be considered very loose and ineffective. If it were up to him, he’d have at least half the Chekskis closer in, if not inside the building itself.